Human, Martian—One, Two, Three
Ice, the color of spilled platinum on ochre dust, extended from the breached pipeline. Water had spewed into the thin atmosphere and frozen in lumpy stalactites dangling from the pipe. Before long the solid lake would erase itself again, volatilizing into the Martian sky.
As she brought the crawler vehicle toward the pumping station, Rachel Dycek tried to assess the area of spilled ice. “Thousands of liters,” she said to herself, “many thousands. A disaster.”
She turned a sharp eye from the clinging scabs of ice on metal to the broken pipe itself. The thin-walled pipe was more than just breached; someone had torn it apart with a crowbar.
That almost piqued her interest. Almost. But Rachel didn’t let it happen. Her successor would have to deal with this debacle. Let him show off his talents. He deserved the trouble. She no longer considered herself in charge of the Mars colony.
As she drove up, three dva emerged from the insulated Quonset hut beside the pumping station. The dva—from the Russian word for “two”—were second-stage augmented humans, surgically altered and enhanced to survive the rigors of the Martian environment. Rachel watched them approach; she recognized none of them, but she had done little hands-on work herself with the second stage. Only the first.
She parked the crawler, checked her suit’s O2 regenerator system, then cycled through the airlock.
“Commissioner Dycek!” the leading dva greeted her. He was a squat man covered with thick silver and black body hair, wearing loose overalls, no environment suit. Rachel looked at him clinically; she had spent a great deal of her time in UN hearings justifying every surgical change she had made to the dva and their more extremely modified predecessors the adin.
The man’s nose and ears lay flat against his head to protect against heat loss, and his nostrils were wide sinks on his face. The skin had a milky, unreal coloration from the long-chain polymers grafted into his hide. His chest ballooned to contain grossly expanded lungs.
The other two dva, both females also wearing padded overalls, clung beside him like superstitious children. They let the man do the talking.
“We did not expect someone of such importance to investigate our mishap,” the dva man said. His accent was thick and exotic; from the southern Republics, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan most likely. He shuffled his feet in the rusty sand, kicking loose fragments of rock. “You see, it is much worse than we reported in our initial transmission.”
Rachel stepped forward, turning her head inside the environment suit. “What do you mean, is worse? How much water was lost?”
“No, the loss is what you see here.” The dva man gestured to the metallic sheet of ice. Wisps of steam rose from its surface. The salmon-colored sky had an olive tinge from the algal colonies that had proliferated in the atmosphere for nearly a century. Rachel saw no sign of the seasonal dust storm she knew to be on its way.
“Come with me,” the man said, “we will show you what else.”
As the dva man turned with the two women beside him, Rachel finally placed him and his ethnic group. Kazakh, from one of the abandoned villages around the dried-up Aral Sea. The Aral Sea had been one of Earth’s largest fresh-water bodies until the early twentieth century, when it had been obliterated by Joseph Stalin. Trying to rework the desert landscape to fit his whim, Stalin had expended all that water to irrigate rice fields in the desert—rice, of all things!—until the Aral shoreline had retreated kilometers and kilometers inland, leaving boats high on dry land, leaving fishing villages starving and disease-ridden. The area had never recovered, and when the call went out for dva volunteers, many families from the Aral region had leaped at the chance to come to Mars, to make a new start. Even here on a new planet, though, they clung to their ethnic groupings.
Rachel followed the dva man. Her suit crinkled, unwieldy from its high internal pressure. The three dva led her to their hut and then behind it. Part of the back wall had been knocked down and then shored up. Bright scars showed where someone had battered his way in from the outside.
Under a coating of reddish dust and tendrils of frost, two iron-hard corpses lay on the ground. Rachel bent down to look at the wide, frozen eyes, the splotched, bloodstained fur, the ragged slashed throats.
With a grim smile, Rachel could think only of how the new commissioner, Jesús Keefer, was going to have a terrible blot on his first month as her successor. So far Keefer and the UN had kept everything cordial, a comfortable transition period between two commissioners who held nothing but outward respect for each other. But Rachel had been cut out of all responsibility, with nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs in the pressurized habitation domes until the supply ship came to take her back to Earth. After she had gone, Keefer would probably find some way to connect this event with something Rachel had done during her administration. He had to keep his own record clean, after all.
“We left this other one by himself.” The dva man took her to the far side of the Quonset hut. “We did not want him tainting the soil beside our comrades.”
The third body lay sprawled, arms akimbo, head cocked against a boulder as if the dva survivors had tossed his body there in disgust. Inside her helmet, Rachel Dycek let out a gasp.
“Adin,” the dva man said, stating the obvious. First-phase augmented human.
“I thought they were all dead by now,” Rachel said.
“Not all,” the dva man answered, gesturing with his stubby hand at the exaggerated adaptations of the adin. “One other escaped.”
The dva looked human—distorted to the point of the caricatures found in Western newspapers, but human nevertheless. But the adin, placed on Mars in an earlier stage of the terraforming process, had endured more extreme transformational surgery. The eyes were deep-set under a continuous frill that hooded the eyes to shelter them from cold and blowing dust; the nostrils were covered with an extra membrane to retain exhaled moisture. A second set of lungs made bulbous protrusions in the adin’s back, half hidden by this one’s skewed position in the dust. The adin’s body lay naked in the freezing air.
“He came out of the darkness,” the dva man said. The two women nodded beside him. “His comrade smashed the pipeline, and we were distracted by the screaming sound of the water. This adin came through the back wall of our dwelling and attacked us. He slashed the throats of our two comrades while they were still trying to wake up. We managed to club him to death.”
Rachel noticed what she should have seen right away. Frozen blood trailed dark lines from the adin’s ears; his eyes had shattered. “Down here on the plain the air pressure must have been killing him. The adin were adapted for conditions much worse than this.”
She heard faint sounds from the chemical O2 regenerator system in her suit. It hissed and burbled as it made her air. She marveled at the irony of the atmosphere being too thick, the temperature too warm for the first group of Mars-adapted humans.
Rachel turned back to the lake of ice and the broken pipeline that stretched from the water-rich volcanic rocks of the Tharsis highlands. “Can you repair this yourselves?” she asked. She did not want to report back to the UN base if she didn’t need to.
The dva man nodded as if it were a matter of pride. “We are self-sufficient here. But we hope there will be replacements for … for our lost comrades. We have much work to do.”
Rachel made a noncommittal response. No more dva would be created, and both of them knew it. Though conditions on Mars remained worse than a bad day in Antarctica, tough unmodified humans would soon be making an earnest attempt at colonization, more than just the token UN base Rachel Dycek had overseen. Politics had changed, and the days of augmented humans—and their creator—were over.
“You will need to make your repairs with haste,” Rachel said. “A Class-Four dust storm is on its way from the north and should arrive late today.”
The dva women looked at her with sharp, deep-set eyes. The man nodded again and took a step backward. “Thank you, Commissioner. We already know about the storm. We can smell it in the air.”
The response took her aback. Of course the dva would know such things just by living closer to the Martian environment.
Rachel herself had been concerned only with how the storm would obliterate her own tracks, allowing her to disappear forever.…
The breached water pipeline had been a mere pretext for her to take one of the crawlers from the inflatable base. Everyone else had duties, and no one had complained when she volunteered to make the long trip. Now the dva would perform their repair tasks, and Commissioner Keefer would think Rachel had taken care of everything. She would be long gone before anybody suspected something might be wrong.
After cycling back through the crawler’s airlock, she drove off toward the volcanic highlands and the mighty rise of Olympus Mons, leaving the dva behind with their spilled ice and their dead. She had no intention of ever returning to them, or to her base.
* * *
Even on the highest slopes, the Martian air tasted spoiled to Boris Tiban. His first inclination would have been to mutter a curse and spit at the ground, but he had learned decades ago never to waste valuable moisture in pointless gestures. All the adin had learned that in their first days on Mars.
Boris reached the opening of the cave and turned to survey the endless slope that stretched down to the horizon. The climb from the plains to the highlands had not even left him out of breath. With only a third of the gravity that his body had been born to, Mars made him feel like a superman. He belonged here at high altitudes, where he could still breathe.
Two of the other adin came out to greet him as he stood in the cave entrance. They appeared unkempt, inhuman—as they had been designed to look. When they saw him alone, they hesitated. Stroganov asked, “Where is Nicholas?”
“Dead. The dva killed him.” But the cause of death had been more than the dva. He and Nicholas had descended too rapidly, and the atmospheric pressure had maddened him with pain. Nicholas had begun to hemorrhage before the dva struck their first blow.
“Oh, Boris!” Bebez said. Her words sounded too human coming from the tight, insulated lips, the flattened face.
Boris leaned against his pointed metal staff, torn from the center of a transmitting dish, and closed his eyes. Boris Tiban. That was what they had called him in the camps in Siberia, decades ago on Earth before his surgical transformation into adin. Prior to that he had worked in the Baku oil fields near the Caspian Sea; his superiors had showed no mercy when a fire in his area caused a major explosion that destroyed a week’s production of petroleum. Sentenced to Siberia, Boris Tiban had grown strong in the hellish winter wasteland, the harsh labor. And then they had snatched him away again, put him through rigorous selection procedures, made him sign forms written in English, a language he could not read, and then worked their black cyborg magic on him.
“Is Boris all right? Why doesn’t he come inside?”
Boris had never heard Cora Marisov’s voice in the rich atmosphere of Earth, but he imagined it had been deep and musical, not the shrill tones caused by the thin air. Cora herself must have been beautiful. She refused to leave the shadows now, especially now.
He stepped into the cave. “We destroyed one of the water pumping stations. It will do no good. Nicholas died.”
Inside, the caves were comfortable, the air breathable. The dim light hid the traces of green lichen crawling over the rocks. Boris remembered how excited he had been, all the adin had been, when their terraforming efforts began to show results: the lichens, the algae, the changing hue of the sky. They had worked together in selfless exertion, tearing themselves apart to terraform the planet, to make it a better place for themselves.
The adin had been the first true Martians, feeling the soil with their bare feet, breathing the razor-thin air directly into their enhanced lungs. They had set out to conquer a world, and they had succeeded—too well. Now none of them could breathe the dense air below.
Cora came out, swaying as she walked. She went to him, and he embraced her. “I am glad you came back. I was worried.”
Boris could not feel the details of her body against him. The long-chain polymers lacing his skin insulated against heat loss but also deadened the nerve endings. He felt like a man in a rubber monster suit from a ridiculous twentieth century film about Martians. But like those costumed actors, Boris Tiban was human inside. Human!
With the death of Nicholas, only five of the adin remained of the initial 100. He, and Cora, and three others.
And Cora frightened him most of all.
* * *
Through the trapezoidal windowports of the crawler, Rachel Dycek could look out at the Martian sky and see bright stars even during the daytime. Twice a day the burning dot of Phobos swam from horizon to horizon, running through its phases—full, to quarter, to crescent, to new—though they were visible only in telescopes. The other moon, Deimos, seemed nailed to the sky, hanging in nearly the same place day after day, as it slowly lost pace with the planet’s rotation.
The uphill slope of Olympus Mons was shallow, taking forever to rise up from the Tharsis Plain until it pushed itself clear of the lower atmosphere. The crawler vehicle made steady progress, kilometer after kilometer.
The monotonous landscape sprawled out on all sides. Rachel felt small and insignificant, unable to believe the arrogance with which she had tried to change all this. She had been successful against a world; because of her work, adapted humans could live in the open air of Mars—but now her successors were tossing her aside as casually as if she had been the most miserable failure. That phase of the project was over, they said.
The terraforming of Mars had begun with atmospheric seeding of algae many decades before the first permanent human presence on the planet. The algae latched onto the reddish dust continually whipped into the air, gobbled the abundant carbon dioxide, photosynthesized the weak sunshine, and laid the groundwork of terrestrial ecology.
Encke Basin, in the Southern Highlands, showed the great recent scar where the united space program had diverted a near-Earth comet into Mars. The comet brought with it a huge load of water, and the heat of impact measurably (though only temporarily) raised the planet’s temperature. Encke Sea had volatilized entirely within seven years, further raising the atmospheric pressure.
But the terraforming had been an enormous and unending drain on Earth’s coffers, siphoning off funds and resources that—some said—might better be spent at home. Fifty years had passed, and still no humans smiled under the olive sky or romped through the rust-colored sands as the propaganda posters had promised. Popular interest in the project had dropped to its lowest point. The beginning of a worldwide recession nearly spelled the end of a resurrected fourth planet.
No wonder the Sovereign Republics looked on Rachel Dycek as a national hero. With her secret work, she had succeeded in creating a new type of human that could survive in the harsh environment. Double lungs, altered metabolism, insulated skin like a living protective suit.
In a surprise move, suddenly there were people living on Mars—and they were Russians, Siberians, Ukrainians! The news shocked the world and catapulted Mars back into the headlines again.
Rachel Dycek and her team came out of hiding with their rogue experiments and raised their hands to accolades. A hundred human test subjects began eking out a living on the surface of Mars, breathing the air, setting up terraforming industries, ingesting the algae and lichens and recovered water. They transmitted progress reports that the whole world watched. They were called the adin, the first.
After months of interrogation by outraged—or perhaps envious, Rachel thought—investigative commissions from the world scientific community, she and her team had developed a second generation of Mars-adapted humans, the dva, who needed less drastic changes to survive on a world growing less hostile year by year.
All the enhanced males were given vasectomies before they were shipped to Mars; since they were not genetically altered, any children conceived by adin would have been normal human babies who would die instantly upon taking their first freezing, oxygen-starved breaths.
And finally, just five years ago, a “natural” human presence had been established on the surface, living in thin-walled inflatable colonies set up in canyons protected from the harsh weather. Rachel had been given the title of commissioner of the first Mars base as a reward for her accomplishments. She had watched as her dva workers paved the way on the highlands, remaking the world for humans to live on unhindered.
The dva project no longer needed her supervision, though; and most of the adin had abandoned their work and died out before Rachel ever set foot on the planet. Adapted humans were a short-term phase in the terraforming scheme.
Jesús Keefer, the UN Mars Project advisor, had come to replace her. Rachel’s work on Mars was finished, and she had been ordered to go home. Keefer would not want her around, and Rachel’s superiors had left her no choice. They would return her to Earth a well-respected scientist and administrator. She would fill her days with celebrity banquets, lecture tours, memoirs, interviews. Charities would want her to endorse causes; corporations would want her to endorse products. Her face would appear on posters. Children would write letters to her.
It would be pathetic. Everything would remind her of how she had been retired. Obsolete. Tossed aside now that she had completed her task. But Mars was her home, her child.
The crawler toiled up the lava slope of Olympus Mons. Black lumps of ejecta thrust out like monoliths from the dust, scoured and polished into contorted shapes by the furious wind. On the sunward side of some of the rocks she could see gray-green smears of lichen, a tendril of frost. It made her heart ache.
Even in the one-third gravity her body felt old and weak. Returning to Earth—and the extra weight it would make her carry—would be hell for her.
Instead she had made up her mind to go to the highest point in the solar system, fourteen miles above the volcanic plain. Make sure you finish up at the top, she had always said. Olympus Mons stood proudly above most of the atmosphere, two and a half times the height of Mount Everest on Earth.
On the edge of the eighty-kilometer-wide caldera, Rachel Dycek would stand in her laboring environmental suit and look across her new world.
Already she could see the bruised color of the northern sky as the murky wall of dust stampeded toward the southern hemisphere.
The crawler itself might survive—the vehicles had been designed to be tough—but the sandstorm would obliterate all traces of her.
* * *
Cora Marisov remained in the shadows of the lava tubes where the adin lived, partly out of shyness, partly out of the revulsion she felt toward her changing body.
Fifteen years ago her eyes had been modified for the wan Martian sunlight. They had been dark eyes, beautiful, like polished ebony disks, slanted with the trace of Mongol features retained by many Siberians. Her Martian eyes, though, were set deep within sheltering cheekbones and brow ridges, covered with a thick mesh of lashes. She remembered her grandmother braiding her hair and singing to her, marveling at what a beautiful girl she was. Her grandmother would no doubt run away shrieking now, making the three-fingered sign of the Orthodox cross.
Cora made her way up the sloping passageway to where sunlight warmed the rocks. The wind picked up as she stepped outside. The cramps in her abdomen struck again, making her wince, but she forced herself to keep moving. She used her fingers to collect strands of algae that had clung to the flapping skimmer-screens that captured airborne tendrils. The adin would cook the algae down, leach out the dusts, and bake it into dense, edible wafers.
After greeting her upon returning from his raid, Boris Tiban sat brooding in silence below, basking near the volcanic vent. She thought of him as a rogue, one of the legendary Siberian bandits, or perhaps one of the exiled revolutionaries. It had taken her a long time to grow accustomed to the abomination of his body, the lumpy alien appearance, the functional adaptations tacked onto his form.
She recalled her emotions the first time they had made love, more than the usual turmoil she felt when lying with a man for the first time. This was no longer a man, but a freak, with whom she grappled in a charade of love.
He had taken her under the dim sun, inside a sheltering ring of lava rock that reminded her of a primitive temple. She lay back in the cold, red dust but could not feel the sharp rocks against her padded back. When Boris held her and caressed her and lay his body on top of her, she could enjoy little of his touch. Too much of her skin’s sensitivity had been surgically blocked.
Thin wind had whistled around the rocks, but she could hear Boris’s breathing, faster and faster, as he pushed into her. Her external skin may have been deadened, but she squirmed and made a small noise deep in her throat; the nerves inside had not been changed at all. They moved and grabbed at each other, making an indentation in the dust that looked afterwards as if a great struggle had occurred there.
They had nothing to worry about. The Earther doctors had made sure they were all sterile before dumping them on this planet. Sex was one of the few pleasures they could still enjoy. Cora and Boris had made love often. What did they have to lose? she thought bitterly.
A hundred of the adin had set out to establish new lives on Mars. Eight had died within the first week when their adaptations did not function as expected; more than half succumbed within the first year, unable to adapt to the harsh new environment.
As good workers, they had transmitted regular reports back to Earth, at first every day, then every week, then intermittently. With a forty-minute round-trip transmission lag, they could transmit their report and be gone again from the station before the Earth monitors could respond. Boris had liked using the delayed messages to taunt and frustrate. The Earthers couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
After three years, cocky with invulnerability, Boris had spoken to the remaining adin. The Earthers had abandoned them on Mars, he said, to sink or swim depending on their own resourcefulness. Earth wanted to watch a soap opera, the quaint outcasts’ struggle for survival. Finally, Boris transmitted an arrogant refusal to do terraforming work anymore, and then destroyed the station. He had taken the metal spire from the tip of the dish and kept it as his royal staff.
By that time, only thirty adin remained. They moved to higher altitudes where the climate was more comfortable, the air thinner and easier to breathe.
Within a Martian year, the first dva arrived. They had been planned to replace the adin all along.…
Now, her arms laden with wind-borne algae strands, Cora turned and listened to an approaching mechanical noise, tinny in the thin air. She looked down the slope and saw the human crawler in the distance, raising an orangish-red cloud behind it.
Cora stumbled back down into the cave, but already the other adin had heard it. Boris leaped to his feet from where he had been brooding; his body glistened with diamonds of frozen vapor. He held the pointed staff in his hand and peered out the window opening. The other three adin hurried to him.
No one paid attention to her. She couldn’t be much help to them right now anyway.
Cora slumped down against the rough rock wall, breathing heavily and sorting out the algae strands. She felt tears spring to the corners of her eyes as she patted her swollen belly—the last great practical joke of all.
* * *
The crawler helped Rachel choose the best course. She opted to follow a gaping chasm that spilled down the slope of Olympus Mons, possibly extending to the base of the towering cliff that lifted the volcano from the Tharsis bulge. The chasm was one of the only landmarks she found on the vast uphill plain. It suggested days long past when liquid water had spilled downhill from melting ice. Or perhaps the enormous shield volcano had simply split its seams. She knew little about geology; it was not her area of expertise. If she had been a geologist on Mars, her specialty would never have become obsolete.
Gauges showed the outside air pressure dropping as she ascended. The wind speed picked up, bringing gusts that carried enough muscle to rattle the crawler. She had been climbing for half a day. The distant sun had passed overhead and dropped to the northwestern horizon. Behind her reeled two parallel treads, marking the path of the crawler. They would be erased when the storm hit, certainly before anyone thought to come looking for her.
With a momentary twinge of guilt, Rachel hoped the dva at the pumping station would be all right, but she knew they had been trained—and made—to survive the weather conditions of this new transitional Mars.
Ahead Rachel saw areas that looked like ancient volcanic steam vents, lava tubes, and towering jagged teeth of black rock rotten with cavities formed by blowing dust. It looked like an extraterrestrial Stonehenge guarding a gateway to a wonderland under Mars. Long sunset shadows stretched like dark oil spilling down the slope.
And then figures stepped away from the rocks, emerging from the lava tubes. Human figures—no, not quite human. In the fading light she recognized them.
Adin.
She saw three at first, and then a fourth stepped out. This one carried a long metal staff. Her heart leaped with amazement, awe, and a little fear. Rachel’s first impulse was to turn the crawler around and flee back downslope to report the presence of this encampment of rogue “Martians.” What would they do to her if they caught her?
But instead she stopped and parked the vehicle, locking its treads. So what might they do, and what did it matter? She sealed the protective plates over the windowports, then stood up. The recompressed air in her suit tasted cold and metallic.
Rachel had nothing to lose, and she wanted to know how the adin had fared, what they had done, why they had broken off contact with Earth. At least she would know that much before she died, and it would bring closure to her work. She had to find out for herself, even if no one else would know. She was probably the only one who cared anyway.
She cycled through the door of the crawler and turned back to key the locking combination. Rachel stepped forward to meet the adin survivors as they bounded toward her.
* * *
The Earther inside the suit looked fragile, like eggshells strung together with spiderwebs. She would never survive ten seconds unprotected outside.
Assisted by Stroganov, Boris took the captive woman’s arm and lifted her off the ground. Her reflective suit, bloated from internal pressure, felt slick and unnatural in his grip. He noticed that the suit design had changed somewhat since he had last dealt with Earthers, when they had first deposited the adin on the Martian surface.
He and Stroganov carried their captive easily in the low gravity; oddly, she did not struggle. Boris set the woman down in the dimness of the lava tube and scrutinized her small body. Apparently nonplussed, she straightened herself and looked around the grotto. Through the faceplate of her helmet, Boris saw dark eyes and an angular face, salt-and-pepper hair. He discerned no expression of helplessness and fear. He found it disconcerting.
“I recognize you,” the Earther woman said. Her words filtered through the speaker patch below the faceplate in crisp textbook Russian straight from Moscow schooling. “You are Boris Petrovich Tiban.”
Pleased that she knew him but also angry at where she must have seen him, Boris said, “You must have been entertained by our struggle for survival on this world, while you sat warm and cozy on yours? How often do they replay my last transmission to Earth, just before I dismantled the dish?” He rang his staff on the porous lava floor for emphasis.
“No, Boris Tiban, I remember you from my selection procedures.” She paused. “Let me see, Siberian labor camp, correct? You had been a worker at the Baku oil fields in Azerbaijan. Your record showed that you got into many brawls, you came to work drunk more often than not. During one shift you had an accident that started a fire in one of the refinery complexes. The resulting explosion killed two people and ruined a week’s oil production.”
The other three adin stepped away, looking at her in amazement. Bebez grabbed onto Elia’s arm. Boris felt a cold shiver crawl up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature of Mars. Flickers of memory brought him fuzzy glimpses of this woman, dressed in a white uniform, bustling down cold tile halls. “How do you know all this?”
The woman’s response was a short laugh. She seemed genuinely amused. “I selected the final adin candidates myself. I performed some of the surgery. I made you, Boris Tiban. You have survived here because of the augmentations I added to your body. You should be grateful to me with every breath you take of Martian air.” She turned around, flexing her arm. The suit made crinkling noises.
“I do not remember these others as well,” she continued. “There were so many candidates in the first phase.”
Boris felt the fury boil within him. It all came back to him now. “Doctor … Dycek—is that your name, or have I remembered it wrong?” She was provoking him, taunting him—perhaps she did not know him as well as she thought. Stroganov gawked at her, then at him; yes, he remembered her, too, the smell of chemicals, the slice of pain, the promises of freedom, the exile on this planet.
Boris brought the metal staff up. “Maybe I should just smash open your helmet.”
“Do what you will. I never intended to return anyway.”
Boris stared into her dark eyes distorted by the transparent polymer. He could not say anything. She had made him helpless.
“Tell me why you are so angry,” she continued. “We set you free of your labor camp. You signed all the papers. We gave you a world to tame and all the freedom to do it. Better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven, is that not correct?”
All the clever words tumbled in his throat, clambering over each other to come out. Where was the tough, charismatic leader who had conquered Mars? He had made his speeches over and over to the surviving adin; but now he had the proper target in front of him. He clenched his hand so tightly that he actually felt the nails against his thick, numb palm.
The anger finally burst out, and Boris shouted in a way that overrode all his training for shallow breaths and conservation of exhaled moisture. “You created us for Mars—and then you took Mars away!”
He gestured out beyond the cave walls. In his mind he held a picture of the growing lichen, the tracings of frost on the lava rock, the thickening air. Dr. Dycek looked at him through the faceplate. He saw a weary patience in her eyes, which made him even angrier. She did not understand.
“Why is she here?” Elia asked him. “Find out why she is here.”
Boris looked down at Dr. Dycek. “Yes, why?”
“I am being replaced. I have no more work on Mars, and I am to be shuttled back to Earth.”
Boris tightened his grip on her thin metallic suit. “So now you know what it feels to be obsolete yourself. We watch our world slipping away with each new dva establishment, with each water-recovery station, with every normal human setting foot on our planet! The time has come to send them a message they cannot ignore.”
Dr. Dycek put her gloved hands on her hips. “I came up here to be swept away in the dust storm. They will never find my body. If you kill me it makes no difference.”
“We could dump your body just outside of the flimsy inflatable base. They would find you then.”
“Then someone would have to hunt you down,” Dr. Dycek said. “Why bloody your hands? No need to add murder to your conscience.”
Boris laughed at that. He felt easier now, more in control. “Murder? It is murder only when a human kills another human. Mars will be killing you, Dr. Dycek. Not me.” He hefted the metal staff over his head, ready to swing it down upon the curved faceplate. She tilted her head up. “It is the way with all creatures: those who cannot adapt to their environment must die. So here, breathe the clear, cold air of Mars. It will be a grand gesture for the adin!”
“Oh Boris, stop!” It was Cora’s voice, sounding annoyed. She made her way out of the shadows from the back of the cave. “I once admired your ways, but now I am tired of how you must make a grand gesture of everything. Tearing up our transmitter, sabotaging the dva pumping station, even blowing up the Baku oil refinery.”
“That was all justified!” Boris snapped. But he watched Dr. Dycek’s attention flick away from him as soon as Cora stepped into the light. Cora panted, then winced at internal pain.
“She’s pregnant!” Dr. Dycek said. “How? That’s impossible!”
For a moment, Boris thought her comment so ludicrous that he stifled a chuckle. How? Does a doctor not know how a woman gets pregnant?
“Even the best Russian sterilization procedures must not be one hundred percent effective,” Cora answered.
Dr. Dycek’s entire attitude altered. “Your baby will die if it is born up here! It will have none of your adaptations. Just a normal, human child.”
“We know that!” Boris shouted.
“This changes everything. An adin having a child! The first human born on Mars!” Her voice rose with command as if they were her slaves—just as she had sounded in the adin training and therapy sessions back on Earth. “We will have to take you in the crawler vehicle back down,” she said to Cora. “I can pressurize the cabin slowly so you will acclimate and tolerate the atmosphere below for a short time.”
Boris felt his control of the other adin slipping like red dust through his fingertips. Stroganov and Bebez nodded, looking at the suited figure and ignoring him. Cora stepped forward, so intent with new hope and excitement that she did not try to hide her swollen appearance. “You can save my baby?”
“Perhaps. If we get you back to the base.”
“This is good news, Boris!” Elia said. “We thought the baby would die for certain.”
Boris released his hold on Dr. Dycek’s arm and turned to face his four companions in the cave. “Yes, save the child! And then what? Then everything will be perfect? Then all our problems will be solved? No! Then the Earthers will know where we are. They will come here and watch us die off, one by one. They will make a documentary program about us, the failed experiment. Maybe it will be on worldwide National Geographic?”
He moved toward the cave opening to the deepening dusk outside. It was difficult for him to stomp in anger in the low gravity. “You are all fools! I can have more intelligent conversations with the rocks.”
Boris Tiban stalked out into the air to stare at the brightening stars, at Phobos rising again in the east and the pinprick of Deimos suspended partway up the sky. He felt like the king of all Mars, a king who had just been overthrown.
* * *
Not even Boris’s tantrum could disturb Rachel’s concentration as she stared at the rounded abdomen of the adin woman. The survival of these augmented humans impressed her, but the simple miracle of this pregnancy that should never have happened amazed her much more. A pregnancy, the type of thing men and women had been doing for millions of years—but never before on this planet.
She and her medical team had seen no need to sterilize the female adin, a much more difficult operation than a vasectomy. Though Rachel had heard of men siring children years after they had had vasectomies, she and her team considered that possibility to be an acceptable risk. Russian medicine had somewhat low standards for “acceptable risks.” Rachel could hardly believe it herself.
But the tight skin stretched over Cora’s belly spoke otherwise. The thick adin fur wisped up and curled over, showing white patches where toughened skin had been stretched to its limits. Rachel reached out with a gloved hand to touch the bulge, but she could feel little through the protective material.
Cora seemed more preoccupied with excusing Boris’s temper. “He is not always like this. He is strong and has kept us alive by our own wits for ten years now, but everything is running through his fingers. He lost our companion Nicholas two nights ago in a raid.” She drew a deep breath. Her words carried a rich Siberian accent that evoked thoughts of wild lands and simple people. “These grand gestures of his always backfire.”
Suddenly Cora’s mouth clamped shut and she let out a hiss. She squeezed her eyelids together. The skin on her abdomen tightened until it had a waxy texture and was as hard as the rind of a melon. Her hands groped for something to grab onto, finally seizing a lump of lava. She squeezed the sharp edges until blood oozed from shallow cuts in her palms, freezing into a sparkling smear on the rock.
Rachel knelt beside Cora while the other adin came closer, showing their concern. Rachel had never had children of her own; she had been too preoccupied with her work, too driven, too dedicated. She had never regretted it, though—had she not done something far more important by preparing the first human to set foot on Mars?
Cora gasped out her next words after the spasm passed. “It’s all right. For now. That has been happening for days. I can bear the pain, but I can concentrate on little else.”
“You must not have the child here,” Rachel repeated. She didn’t know if the baby would be getting enough oxygen through the mother’s bloodstream even now, but it certainly could not survive in the open air. “How frequent are the contractions?”
“I have no idea,” Cora snapped in a voice filled more with pain and weariness than anger. “I don’t exactly have a chronometer! Boris left all that behind when we came to the highlands.”
“They are about every fifteen minutes,” said one of the adin, Bebez. “You must get her away from here. Give her whatever help you can offer. The baby will surely die up here.”
Rachel would have to give up her own pointless gesture of defiance, standing on the volcano top while the dust storm swept her away. But it seemed a ridiculous thing to do now, like something Boris Tiban would attempt. A grand gesture that would impress no one. Instead, she would accomplish something to hold up in front of Jesús Keefer’s face.
Cora’s infant would focus Earth’s attention once again on the adin and the dva, and on Rachel’s own efforts. She might even get a reprieve, be allowed to stay on Mars to study the remaining altered humans and how they adapted to their changing planet. But she felt she was doing this for something else as well. Better to save a life than to take her own.
“Let us go and save your child, Cora. My crawler is not far.”
Cora stood up and Rachel touched her shoulder. The other three adin nodded their agreement but made no move to help as the two women went to the door opening into the Martian dusk.
Outside, Boris Tiban was nowhere to be seen. The sky’s green had turned a muddy ochre. The upthrust rocks were stark against the smooth slope of Olympus Mons.
The crawler was gone.
Leaving Cora to stand against a rock, Rachel ran over to where she had stopped the vehicle. The low gravity made her feel light on her feet. The wind ran groping fingers over her suit.
She found the crawler’s tracks, already beginning to blur in the wind, then she came to a sloughed-off portion of the chasm wall where a large object had been toppled over the edge. Pry marks in the lava soil showed how Boris had used his metal staff.
As dread surged inside her, Rachel went to the brink of the gorge. More lava rock lay strewn a hundred meters below. In the gathering shadows of night, she could make out the squared-off form of her vehicle, out of reach far below.
* * *
In darkness, they used tough cables and harsh white spotlights to reach the bottom of the chasm. The adin had taken the equipment from the remaining cache of supplies they had brought with them when they had abandoned the Martian lowlands. Low gravity made the climb easier.
Cora allowed Stroganov and Dr. Dycek to help her over the roughest patches. She had to stop four times during the descent while cramps seized her body, demanding all her attention.
Over the past two days the cramps had clenched her stomach muscles, squeezing and pushing, then gradually loosening again. At first they had been intermittent, several an hour and then giving her a few hours’ rest before they started again. But the pain grew worse, more regular, more intense, as her muscles lowered the baby, helped position it, started to open Cora up inside. Cora knew the baby could come within hours, or she could have to endure this for several more days.
She watched Stroganov jerk the thin cable as his spotlight shone down on the crawler vehicle surrounded by broken scree. He had never told anyone his first name, but clung to his family identity; he traced his lineage back to the first nobles sent by Peter the Great to conquer the wilds of Siberia.
The crawler had plowed a clean path down the cliff as it fell, and its low center of mass had brought it to a rest upright, though canted against a mound of rubble. As Stroganov played the light over the scratched and dust-smeared hull, Cora looked for the disastrous damage she expected to see.
“It appears to be intact,” Dr. Dycek said. She squeezed Cora’s shoulder and jumped the last few meters to the bottom of the chasm, landing with deeply bent knees. Her voice sounded thin and far away as she shouted through her faceplate. “This vehicle is tough, built to withstand Mars—as you were.”
Dr. Dycek held out her hands for Elia to toss down one of the spotlights. From above, Cora tried to pay attention to the operation. Using the spotlight beam, Dr. Dycek climbed around the vehicle, inspecting the metal plates protecting the trapezoidal windowports. She rapped on one with her gloved fist, then held her fist high in satisfaction.
On her own initiative, Cora began the last part of the descent. Stroganov and Elia helped her until they all stood on the jumbled floor of the chasm. Loose boulders the size of houses lay strewn about. Cora looked up to the top of the cliff wall, a black razor-edge that blocked all view of the stars. Bebez had remained in the caves, and Cora saw no figure looking down at them.
They had called into the darkness for Boris to come and help them, but he had remained silent and hidden.
Dr. Dycek trudged up to them. “The door-lock mechanism is still functioning. The antenna is smashed, though, so we will not be able to let anyone on the base know we are coming.” She paused. “From the dents around the antenna base, it looks to me as if Boris knocked it off himself.”
The other adin said nothing. Cora nodded to herself. Yes, that was the way Boris would do it. He was so predictable.
Then her knees buckled as a new labor spasm squeezed her like a fist and sucked away thoughts of the outside world. Stroganov caught her and held her upright.
Dr. Dycek grabbed one of Cora’s arms and began to stumble-walk her toward the crawler. “Come on. We have at least a day’s journey before we get back to the base. Even at that, I cannot be certain this chasm will lead us anywhere but a blind end. But there is no other way. The crawler is down here, and we have no choice of roads. You have no time to waste.”
Dr. Dycek hauled her into the tilted opening of the crawler’s small airlock. Stroganov and Elia helped, each of the adin men squeezing Cora’s numb skin in a silent gesture of farewell.
“The storm is coming,” Stroganov said, sniffing the air.
“I know,” Dr. Dycek answered. She made no other comment about it, but faced Cora instead. “We will get you inside and begin the slow pressurization of the interior. We have to make the atmosphere thick enough so the baby can breathe, in case it is born along the way.”
Cora dreaded the thought of air as thick as soup and heavy as bricks on her chest, making an ordeal out of every breath—especially during the most exhausting hours of her life.
She doubted the baby would wait until they reached the Earthers’ inflatable base.
The airlock door closed behind them, leaving them in claustrophobic darkness. Already Cora longed for one last breath of the cold air on top of Olympus Mons.
* * *
As the southern hemisphere of the planet Mars entered its winter season, the falling temperature caused great portions of the atmosphere to freeze out. Water vapor and carbon dioxide piled up in layers to form a polar icecap. The resulting drop in air pressure sucked wind from the northern hemisphere down across the equator. Gathering force, the wind rushed to fill the invisible hole at the bottom of the world, picking up dust particles in a fist as tall as the sky.
The storm hit them three hours after they had left the adin encampment. Rachel could barely see as the roiling murk pounded and shook the crawler from side to side. The brilliant high beams of the vehicle’s lights revealed only an opaque haze; the low beams illuminated no more than a shallow puddle of ground directly in front of her. Rachel squinted through the whirlwind, hoping to swerve in time to avoid the largest rocks or another gaping chasm. The walls of the crevasse sheltered them from the worst gusts, but vicious crosscurrents forced her to wrestle with the controls.
Rachel had no idea where the narrow canyon would take her, but she had to follow it. She wound her way along the crevasse floor, hoping it would spill out onto the Tharsis plain or climb back up to the flat surface of Olympus Mons. She did not know where the nearest settlement would be, or if she would have a better chance heading straight for the main base facilities.
As they continued, Rachel increased the air pressure in the crawler, gradually acclimating Cora to the change. The muffled sounds of the scouring gale came through only as distant whispers. Her suit worked double-time to absorb her perspiration. She no longer felt like someone who wanted to surrender.
A wry smile came to Rachel’s face; she had never imagined she would be facing the dust storm in such a manner. Her planned suicide had seemed poignant and dramatic at the time, like a great hero going to meet doom—but now she realized that most people would have shaken their heads sadly and pitied her instead. They would have found her pathetic. They would have reevaluated all of her successes, used her final madness to brush aside the accomplishments and then forgotten about her.
She kept her mind focused on moving ahead, on the need to return to the main base, where she could show Jesús Keefer how important she still was to the Mars project. Keefer had always been impatient with the slow work of the adin and the dva, wanting instead to have humans scrape out a direct existence on Mars from the start.
But Rachel and her team had made it possible for the first humans to walk free on another world. No matter how the future changed, no one could alter that. Her work had resulted in the birth of the first Martian, a landmark event never before rivaled in human history.
Behind her on one of the passenger benches, Cora Marisov spoke little, gasping as another labor spasm hit. Rachel used the vehicle’s chronometer to time them. They occurred about every four and a half minutes. Cora seemed oblivious to the storm outside.
“I think …” Cora said, gasping words that Rachel heard muffled through her helmet, “you had better find a place to stop the crawler. Park it. Shelter. I need you now.”
Rachel slowed the vehicle and risked a glance backward.
Cora lay on the floor, her back propped against the curved metal wall and her legs spread as far apart as she could manage around the mound of her belly. Between her legs a gush of liquid spilled out, steaming and freezing in the icy air.
Her water has broken! Rachel lurched the crawler over to the canyon wall under what she could dimly see as an overhang. Now what would she do? Rachel was a doctor, no problem. No problem! But she had studied environmental adaptation, worked with cyborg enhancements. The closest she had come to witnessing birth was in staring at cells dividing under a microscope. It had been a long time since her basic training, and she had used none of it in practical situations.
She looked down the treads of the crawler and turned back to Cora. The pregnant adin woman looked up at her; Rachel hoped the faceplate hid her uncertainty.
“I may be able to help you now,” Cora said, “but when the final part of labor comes, I will not be able to hold your hand through this.”
The thought of Cora helping her in the emergency made Rachel stifle a raw-edged giggle, but Cora continued. “I helped my grandmother deliver two babies when I was small. Midwives still do much of that work in Siberia.”
Rachel fought away her scattered emotions and stared into Cora’s dark, slanted eyes. “All right, should I check to see how far you are dilated?”
“Yes. Reach … inside me. Then we will know how much time I have.”
Rachel looked down at her clumsy gloved hand. She checked the external air pressure monitor; though the suit seemed more flexible now that the differential was not so great, she still could not survive unprotected in the crawler cabin. “I dare not remove my suit yet. There is not enough air for me. And the glove is too big as it is. I would hurt you.”
Cora’s eyes shut in a wince and her body shook. Rachel watched her body straining, the augmented muscles stretched to a point where they seemed to hum from the tension. Cora’s fingers scrabbled on the smooth metal floor, looking for something to grasp. After a minute or two, the spasm passed.
Cora took five deep breaths, then brought her attention back to the problem. “We need to learn how long it will be. If I am not fully dilated, we might have enough time to reach your base. If I am, then the baby could come in as little as an hour.”
Rachel drove the panic away and tried to dredge up alternatives from the thin air. “There are small cutting tools in the repair box, and some metal tape.” She looked down at her suit. “I could cut off my glove, seal the sleeve around my arm with the tape. Then I could feel inside you.”
Cora looked at her, saying nothing, as Rachel continued. “My hand would get numb in this cold, but I can raise the internal temperature here as much as you can stand.”
“If you damage the suit, you will never be able to go outside until we reach your base.” Cora closed her eyes in anticipation of another labor pain. “Perhaps you should keep driving. Hope we will find help within another hour or so.”
Instead, Rachel made up her mind and went to the crawler’s tool locker. In this storm, and with the distance yet to travel, they would never get to a safe haven in an hour. She had spent most of a day maneuvering the crawler up the smooth slope of Olympus Mons, making good time and seeing exactly where she was going. She had now been driving barely four hours, over rough terrain, unable to see for the past hour. They would never make it. Better to prepare here.
First, she wrapped the tape around her forearm as tightly as she could, making a crude tourniquet. Then she pulled up the slick fabric around her wrist and removed one of the small cutting tools from the locker. The tough suit material could resist most severe abrasions, but not intentional sawing. Keeping the metal tape at hand, she pulled in a deep lungful of air and sliced across the fabric.
Her ears popped as air gushed out. She could feel the wind and the cold pushing against her skin. The tourniquet could not make a perfect seal. She cut the gash longer, enough that she could pull her fingers out of the glove and thrust her hand through the ragged opening. With her protected hand, she wrapped more metal tape around her wrist where the suit material met the skin. She taped back the flopping, empty glove, then sealed the seam over and over.
Panting, Rachel tried to catch her breath as the suit re-inflated. The chemical oxygen regenerator on her back hissed and burbled, adding to the ringing in her ears. Her head pounded, but her thoughts cleared moment by moment.
Cora squirmed on the floor in her own ordeal. Rachel knelt in front of her. “Cora? Cora, I am ready.” She touched the adin woman’s bristly coating of fur, the waxy texture of her polymerized skin. Rachel’s hand felt crisp from the cold, then sensitivity faded as it grew numb. “Tell me what I should expect to feel inside you.”
Cora blinked and nodded.
The placental water on the crawler floor had sheeted over with a film of ice, clinging in gummy knots to Cora’s inner thighs. Rachel slowly felt the folds of skin between Cora’s legs, dipped her fingers into them, then slid her hand inside.
At first the temperature felt too hot, like melted butter, in startling contrast to the frigid air. She forced herself not to withdraw. Her skin burned.
“Feel the opening deep inside. It is surrounded by a ridge,” Cora said, biting off each word as she said it. “Tell me how wide it is.”
“A little wider than my hand and thumb.”
Cora bit her lip.
Rachel withdrew and grabbed the other woman’s arm. The biting cold of the air felt like acid on her wet hand. “Is that good or bad? I can’t remember my training.”
“Bad. No, good. That means this should be over much sooner. A few hours, perhaps.”
The sound of the storm outside suddenly turned into a monster’s roar, a grinding, crunching sound that pounded through the walls of the crawler. The rock outcropping above them came crashing down, tossing boulders and blankets of dirt.
Rachel fell on her side, clawing at the air; Cora rolled over and curled into a ball to protect her abdomen. Rocks pummeled the top of the crawler, bouncing and thudding. Reddish smears clogged the view from the main front windowports, blowing away in patches as gusts of wind tore it free of the smooth glass.
Rachel got to her knees. She felt herself shaking. The palm of her bare hand seemed to burn into the frigid metal of the floor. “Are you all right?” she asked Cora. The adin woman nodded.
The sounds of the avalanche faded into the roar of the storm, but then another, softer thump sounded on top of the crawler. Cora froze, and her eyes widened.
Rachel got up to go to the crawler’s control panel. Luckily none of the falling rocks had smashed through the front windowports.
Then a face and shoulders appeared from above, hands reaching down from the roof of the crawler, brushing the dust aside. The face pressed against the glass, peering inside and grinning.
An adin. Boris Tiban.
In shock, Rachel caught herself from crying out. She smacked her hands down on the controls for the protective plates, which slammed over the windowports. The last thing she saw was Boris Tiban leaping aside in surprise, vanishing into the tangled murk of the storm. Then the metal clanged into place, leaving the crawler in dimness. The central illumination automatically stepped up, bathing the interior in a blue-white glow.
Cora stared wide-eyed at the sealed windowport. “Boris!” she muttered. She seemed to have forgotten about her labor. “He caused the avalanche. He must have been working at it ever since we stopped.”
“Out in the storm?” Rachel could hardly believe what she had seen herself. “How could he survive without shelter?”
Cora shook her head; Rachel saw a smile on her lips. “He likes to do that, pit himself against the elements. He is proud of how he can cope with anything Mars throws at him. Tamer of Worlds—that is what he wants to be called. He does not like to see you domesticating this planet. Then he will be obsolete.”
“I know what that feels like,” Rachel muttered, then stopped. “But if Boris tries to kill me, he will also destroy you, and his baby. Does he not realize he will murder his own child?”
Cora hung her head, then shuddered with another spasm. Rachel adjusted the air compressors to increase the pressure inside the crawler more rapidly. When Cora recovered, she looked Rachel in the eye and kept her voice flat.
“He needs the baby to die. He has always planned on it.”
Rachel opened and closed her mouth without words; she knew that behind the faceplate she must look like a dying fish in a bowl. “I don’t understand.”
Cora let her slanted eyes fall shut beneath the thick lash membranes. “His grandest gesture of all. He has been anticipating it for months. We have always known the baby would die at birth. I should never have gotten pregnant. That loss would be a direct fault of the Earthers. He has found a way to blame all of our troubles on you. He is good at that.
“When the baby dies, he will have all the reason he needs to strike back. It will be a catalyst, an excuse. Everything must be perfectly justified. Those are the rules by which he plays.” She sighed. “No one ever thought someone like you would come.”
Rachel struggled with the sick logic. “What will he do?”
“He plans to go to your inflatable base and destroy it. With his metal staff, he can tear holes right through the sides of the walls. He can run from one section to the next as fast as his legs will take him, striking and moving. He can do it. The alarms will send everyone into confusion. He can burst every module even after they seal themselves. The people inside will be trapped and he can pick them off, one room at a time. The Earthers might repair some of the walls, but Boris can just strike again. He can wait longer than any of them.”
“But what about you? He’s trying to kill you now, too!”
“That is incidental. He loves me in his own way, but he sees the cause as more important. Just like a great revolutionary.”
Rachel felt anger welling up inside of her. “Well then, I must make sure he has no reason to attack the base. Your baby will live.” She patted Cora’s bulging stomach with her bare hand and turned to look at the heavy metal plates covering the windowports. “We are safe here, for now.”
* * *
Surrounded by the muffled whirlwind of the storm, Cora Marisov gave birth to a daughter. The crawler walls creaked and groaned as the wind tried to push in, but the shelter remained secure.
As soon as Cora’s final labor began, Rachel had no choice but to begin pressurizing the crawler interior as rapidly as the pumps could bring in more air. Many of the intake vents had been clogged with dust from the storm and the avalanche, but the gauges showed the air pressure increasing.
Cora cried out with the effort of her labor, but also gasped, complaining about how difficult breathing had become. “Like a metal band around my chest! My head!”
“There is nothing for it. The baby must breathe when it comes.” No matter what it does to Cora, Rachel thought. “You are strong. I made you that way.”
“I … know!”
When Rachel had pulled the slick baby free, it steamed in the air, glistening with red wetness. “A girl!” she said.
Cora’s mouth remained open, gasping to fill her lungs. The baby, too, worked the tiny dark hole of her mouth in a silent agonized cry of new life, but she could not find enough air.
Rachel moved quickly now. As she had planned, she shucked her suit and popped open the faceplate, letting the blessed warm air gush out. The shock stunned her, but she forced herself to keep moving, to plow through the black specks in front of her vision. A bright pain flashed behind her forehead. Moments later, a warm, thick trickle of blood came from her nostrils.
She grasped the loose end of the metal tape sealing her wrist to the suit. The grip slipped twice before her numb fingers clutched it and tore it off. She let out a howl of pain, releasing half the air left in her lungs. She felt as if she had just flayed the skin off her arm.
She had to hurry. Grogginess started to claim her, but she stumbled through the motions.
Shivering already, she stepped out of the empty suit, letting the metallic fabric fall in a rough puddle on the floor. She wore only a light jumpsuit underneath, clammy with sweat that froze in icy needles against her skin.
Rachel clamped shut the empty faceplate and grabbed up the baby. The infant skin, smeared with red from the birth, took on a bluish tinge as she tried to breathe. The umbilical cord, tied in a crude knot, still oozed some blood.
Cora found the strength to reach over and touch the infant one last time before Rachel slid the girl inside the loose folds of the suit and sealed her whispered cries into silence. She began pressurizing it immediately. The folds began to straighten themselves as air pumped inside.
Heaving huge breaths but still starving for oxygen, Rachel grasped the limp sleeve where she had cut off the glove and knotted it. Suit-warmed air blew from the edge, squirting onto her skin. Rachel clutched the roll of metallic tape and wrapped it around and around the end of the sleeve. The hissing noise stopped, replaced by the ringing in her ears. She crawled over to where regenerated air streamed into the chamber, but that helped only a little.
Cora, though, grew worse. “Can’t inhale,” she said. “Like stones on my chest. Breathing soup.” She was too weak to cope with the increasing difficulty.
Rachel felt all her words go away as she looked at the exhausted new mother, at the mess of blood and amniotic fluid and afterbirth tissue on the crawler floor. This had not been clean and quick like the make-believe births shown in entertainment disks. It looked like some slaughter had occurred here. But not slaughter—new life.
Somehow, Cora got to her knees, wavered as she tried—and failed—to draw a deep breath, then crawled toward the airlock. “You must let me out. Dying. Need to breathe.”
Rachel, dizzy from her own lack of air, tried to fight against confusion. “Not in the storm! Not right after the baby. You are too weak.” But she knew Cora was right. If the adin woman had any chance for surviving, it had to be outside, not in here.
Cora reached the door and rested her head against it, panting. “Strong enough,” she said, repeating Rachel’s words. “You made us that way.”
Rachel watched her open the inner door and haul herself into the airlock. The noise of the storm outside doubled. Cora looked at the sagging environment suit on the floor, focused on the squirming lump that showed the girl’s movements, then raised her deep-set eyes to meet Rachel’s. She looked intensely human and inhuman at the same time.
“I will tell Boris his daughter is alive. Safe.” With great effort, she filled her lungs one more time. “He must face that. Adapt to new conditions—his own words.” She raised her hand in a gesture of farewell, then sealed the door.
Somehow, her words about Boris Tiban did not reassure Rachel.
The noise of the storm muffled again, grew louder as Cora opened the outer door, then finally resettled into relative quiet. Rachel found herself alone with the newborn baby.
* * *
She had to push the crawler into overdrive to break free of the avalanche rubble. The vehicle groaned and lurched as it heaved over boulders, bucking from side to side. Rachel wished she had strapped herself in. Unsupported on the floor, the baby in the environment suit slid over to one corner and came to rest against a passenger bench. She could not hear the infant’s cries over the sound of the storm and the straining engine.
“Come on!” Rachel muttered to herself, pounding the plastic control panel. The effort sent a wash of dizziness over her. Her jaws chattered in the cold. The back of the crawler rose up at an angle over the worst of the obstacles, then she found herself free of the rock slide.
She slid the protective plates aside so she could see her course, though the storm made that nearly impossible. Using less caution now, she increased the crawler’s speed, trusting the vehicle to crush medium-sized rocks under its treads so she would not need to pick a path around them.
The chasm walls lowered and the floor widened within half an hour. She felt the urgency slackening as confidence grew; she would be out on the flat slope of Olympus Mons in a few moments, and she could use the guidance gear to choose the most direct course back home. She eased the crawler to greater speed.
She turned around to glance at the baby, to make sure it had not been injured.
Then Boris Tiban sprang out in front of the vehicle again and bounded onto its sloping hood. The dust swirled around him, but he seemed to draw energy from the storm. He hefted his metal staff over his head like a harpoon. The expression on his face made him look like a savage beast from the wilds of Mars.
Instinctively, Rachel ducked back. She did not think quickly enough to slam the protective plates over the windowports.
Boris brought the pointed rod down with a crunch in the center of the trapezoidal glass plate. A white flower of damage burst around the tip, and a high whine of air screamed out as he withdrew the staff. He brought the tip down again even harder, puncturing another, larger hole through the thick glass.
Rachel heard the wind’s roar and a distant howl that might have been triumph from the adin leader. “Stop!” she shouted, expending precious air. She yanked back on the control levers, bringing the crawler to a sudden halt.
The lurch tossed Boris Tiban from his perch, and he rolled nearly out of sight a few meters away. He staggered to his feet, using the metal staff.
She slapped at the control panel. The brilliant high beams on the crawler stabbed out like an explosion of light. Boris froze, blinded. He wrapped a forearm over his eyes.
Rachel could have accelerated the vehicle then and crushed him under the tread. But she could not do it. She stared at him, listening to the scream of escaping air from the puncture holes. She had created Boris Tiban and exiled him here. He had survived everything Mars could throw at him, and she could not kill him now.
Still unable to see, Boris staggered toward the crawler, raising his staff to strike again.
Cora appeared out of the whirlwind, stumbling and off balance—but perhaps only due to the wind, for she looked stronger than she had when she departed from the crawler. She kept her back to the bright lights.
Boris seemed to sense her presence and turned. He blinked at her in astonishment. Before he could react, Cora snatched the pointed metal staff out of his hand. Delayed by surprise, he did not grab it back immediately. He turned, as if shouting something through the storm at her.
Then Cora shoved the staff through his chest. In the low gravity, her strength was great enough for the thrust to lift him completely off the ground. The spear protruded from his body, puncturing the second set of lungs that rose like a hump on his back. Then she tossed him away from her.
Rachel slapped the palm of her hand against the largest hole in the windowport, picturing herself as the legendary Dutch boy who put his finger in the leaking dike. Instantly she felt the biting cold and the suction tearing at her hand, trying to rip it through the hole. She screamed.
Cora had fallen to the ground outside, but she staggered to her feet and stood in front of the vehicle. She made frantic motions with her arms. Their meaning was clear: Go! Now!
Rachel tore her hand away from the windowport, leaving a chunk of meat behind that dribbled blood and slurped as it was sucked outside. A frosty red smear coated the white cracks in the glass.
Blood dripping from her torn palm, Rachel found the metal tape and pushed several pieces over the punctures in the windowport. The tape dug into the hole, pulled toward the outside. She added a second and then third strip of tape over the punctures, and then began to breathe easier.
Outside, red dust had begun to pile around the body of Boris Tiban. Already Mars hurried to erase all traces of the intruder. Boris had thought himself invincible because he could withstand the rigors of the harsh environment. But Mars had not killed him—a human had, an adin human.
* * *
Hours later, she continued on a straight downhill course. The slope of the volcano offered a relatively gentle road, scoured clean. The wind continued to hammer at her—such storms rarely let up in less than four days—but it no longer seemed such a difficult thing to withstand.
The layers of metal tape sealed the punctures in the front windowport, but air still hummed out. The compressors kept laboring to fill the crawler with air; the heaters warmed the interior as fast as the Martian cold could suck it away. Rachel hoped she could remain conscious for as long as it might take.
The indicators showed the general direction of travel, though the storm and the iron oxide dust in the air could ruin the accuracy of her onboard compass. Boris had smashed her antenna, so she could not pick up the homing beacons of any nearby settlements, nor could she send out a distress signal.
But if she continued down to the base of Olympus Mons, she might encounter one of the dva materials-processing settlements that tapped into leftover volcanic heat, unleashing water from hydrated rock, smelting metals. She had been squinting through the dust for hours—and hoping. She could barely hear the baby crying inside her suit.
Rachel thought her eyes had begun to swim with weariness when she finally saw the yellow lights of a dva encampment. The squat, smooth-curved walls made the outbuildings look like hulking giants. Much of the complex would be underground.
Rachel let herself slump back in the driver’s chair.
She had made it back with the baby. She had returned to her world, when she had intended to be gone forever. Rachel felt a moment of bittersweet failure, wondering now if she could ever have stood alone and faced the onrushing wall of the storm, to let it carry her away into death.
And what would have been the point? An empty gesture for no one but herself.
There was no use mourning the completion of a job well done. Strong people found new goals to achieve, new challenges to face. Weak people bemoaned the loss of great days. Beside her on the crawler floor, this new baby was trying to be strong, to survive against all odds. Rachel Dycek could be strong, too, stronger than Jesús Keefer or the UN administrative council. Adapt to the hostile environment, and defeat it, Boris Tiban would have said. Humanity, in all its forms, would never be obsolete. Rachel would not be obsolete until she surrendered to obsolescence.
Ahead, the dim yellow lights of the dva settlement looked as welcoming as a New Year’s tree. The cold air of Mars whistled outside the windowport of her vehicle, moaning as it tried to enter through the metal tape. But she would not let it harm her.
She had work to do.