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Chapter 41

Jackie Secord sat at the communications station of Nike. Once more she played the final few seconds, the last voices recorded from John Carter.

"Give my love to Tammy back home." An Australian accent, heavier than usual.

"—holy SHIT that's a big rock—" A. J., muttering under his breath, like he always does, not even aware sometimes he's doing it.

". . . please, please, please, hold together . . ."

Tears stung her eyes at the voice she'd known since she was a teenager, the voice that had taught her the difference between Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.

Can't make out the words, but that sharp murmur is Dr. Sakai. Praying, by the sound of it.

"Speed dropping below two hundred. Almost there, Bruce. You're doing great." Madeline Fathom, calm and unruffled, trying to keep anyone from panicking.

Nothing from Rich. I think he must've been holding his breath.

"Please, let her live, even if I don't make it." Joe, worrying about someone else to the end.

The tears came again, as the final moment arrived. A shrieking, shattering, crashing, banging noise, ending with a terrible silence.

"Come now, Jackie. There is nothing more to hear, nothing more except pain." The deep voice was startlingly gentle, as was the hand laid tentatively on her shoulder.

She shrugged Dr. Gupta's hand away.

"He's right, Jackie. It's been almost two hours."

"I'm not leaving!" she shouted, shooting to her feet and turning on Hathaway furiously. "I'm not!" The movement sent her drifting slowly towards the ceiling, as Nike was still turning and her spinning motion had detached her from the floor's grip surface. As the control room was near the center of Nike, it had less than a twentieth of a gravity—and that was focused in the wrong direction, towards the apparent ceiling.

The captain backed up a step when she spun. "Okay, okay. Stay there if you want to. But please stop playing the damn thing over, and over, and over. It's driving me insane."

Clumsily she bounced herself back to the seat. "I haven't played it that—"

"Yes, you have. You've been repeating it the entire time, ever since you sat down."

Jackie stared, eyes still blurred, at the digital readout. He's right. I've been sitting in this chair for over an hour, playing it again and again. She looked around, drawing a shuddering, tearful breath.

Three other people looked back at her with concern and their own shock and sorrow written clearly in their features. Dr. Gupta, dark eyes shadowed with pain over her loss and the loss of the others on John Carter. Jane Mayhew, looking decades older. Ken Hathaway, anger, frustration and resignation all warring for dominance.

"Sorry," she said quietly. "I know you all knew them too. But . . . we started this. Me, Helen, Joe, A.J." A fresh sting of pain threatened to bring tears back.

On the screen shimmered a horrid image of the twisted wreckage of John Carter, as it had been an hour ago before the last imaging satellite fell below the horizon. Her hand tugged at the chain around her neck, the one that held the smooth, shoehorn-shaped replica given to her by Helen just before the presentation.

Suddenly, the radio started talking. With an Australian accent.

"Nike, Nike, this is John Carter, repeat, John Carter calling Nike, come in please."

* * *

Why do I hurt so much? Helen wondered, her mind still dazed. As she shook her head, she became aware that she was in a spacesuit.

Spacesuit? Where . . .

Realization struck, and she sat up suddenly. That was a mistake. Not only did she bang the suit's helmet on something, but her head, already aching, reacted to the jolt by throbbing its protest.

"Ow. A.J.? Joe? Hello, is anyone there?"

Slowly her eyes adjusted. Pinkish light filtered in through a hole in the mostly dust-covered front window. Before moving again, she checked the telltales. Her suit was undamaged, and apparently so was she. The reactive nature of the suit had possibly saved her life, and almost certainly prevented severe injuries. She hoped that the others had been so lucky.

It took considerable force to get her harness to unsnap. Cautiously, she got up.

"Oh, crikey. This wasn't worth the hangover I'm feeling."

"Bruce! You did it!"

"Did I?"

"Well, I'm walking away."

"Well, so you are. Maybe I am too."

"I'd rather have someone else do my walking, but I guess I will be too." A.J.'s voice brought inexpressible relief to her. She'd been afraid that the first lack of response meant there would be none at all.

Irwin finished unsnapping and leaned over to his copilot, checking her vitals. "Hey, Madeline, rise and shine!"

Poking at an unconscious martial artist might not be the brightest idea, Helen thought. She was about to voice that thought when Madeline demonstrated it by striking out and trying to roll away from the fuzzily seen figure looming over her. The roll was rather ineffective, as she was still locked in.

But she recuperated almost instantly. "Huh? Oh. Sorry, Bruce. Didn't mean to hit you."

"No problem, the suit kept you from hurting anything except my dignity."

"We're still alive. Everyone?"

"Not everyone." A.J.'s voice was suddenly utterly devoid of his usual humor. "Shit. I will not be sick in my suit."

Helen turned, and was instantly sorry she had. Dr. Ryu Sakai was pinned against the rear of the compartment by something—a support structure of John Carter, probably—that must have torn free in the last terrible impact, impaling or crushing his entire rib cage. The tough suit might have maintained some integrity, but there were limits to its protective capabilities. The astrogeological specialist was clearly dead.

"Jesus . . ." Rich Skibow spoke for the first time since the crash, tearing his way out of his restraining harness. "Oh, this is horrible."

It was then that Helen remembered that Joe had been sitting in front of Ryu Sakai. For a moment her heart seemed to stop. But . . . there was only one suit pinned to the wall with that hideous dark smear around it.

"Joe! Where's Joe?"

A.J. answered, obviously glad of something to distract him from the gruesome scene in the rear. "Ummm . . . Look, that beam ripped upward through the cabin. With that angle, it would've taken out the support column under Joe's chair. If we were still moving, he . . ."

A.J. trailed off. Helen followed his gaze.

Straight to the hole in the forward window. "Oh, no—"

She leaped toward the window and tripped. The wreck of the SSTO was leaning on something, inclined at an angle of about forty-five degrees both vertically and laterally. Scrambling in the light gravity, she made it to the hole and looked out.

John Carter rested atop a massive boulder five times its size. From her vantage point thirty meters above the rest of the terrain, she could make out a small, dark object more than a fifty meters off: Joe's seat, with a spacesuit still strapped into it.

"Joe! Joe!"

The figure moved. Joe raised an arm slowly and waved. Then said, shakily but firmly:

"By the authority vested in me as a representative of the Ares Project and the first human being to set foot on Mars, I claim all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto for the Project."

"Gah!" said Madeline.

* * *

"Hey, look, I'm sorry," Joe apologized, defensively. "I didn't know he was dead then."

"'S'okay," Rich grunted. "I shouldn't have yelled at you. I'd have found it funny, any other time. I suppose it will be someday."

A.J. emitted a harsh little laugh, as he attached another cable to the support beam for their attempt to remove Ryu Sakai's body. "I will say that Madeline's face was worth seeing, when you opened up that can of worms."

Madeline didn't quite glare at him. She did glare at Joe. "You have absolutely no idea of the headaches this may cause, if your people insist on it."

Joe knew the dialogue focused on his unexpected claiming of Mars because none of them wanted to really think about the gruesome task ahead of them. He was still stuck in his seat, looking at John Carter's red-dusted, ominous, shattered-looking hulk from fifty meters away. He had discovered upon attempting to get up that his leg was apparently broken, and Madeline had insisted he stay there until someone could get out and examine it.

The advice had become more serious when A.J.'s sensor analysis through the suit's onboard biometric monitors indicated that Joe might have a concussion also. He did feel rather detached, his head hurt, and he wanted to take a nap, which were not encouraging symptoms.

"I have some idea, yeah. But I don't know exactly how the legal ins and outs work, so I figured I'd play it safe. Let's face it, we're still a private concern and someday we'll be cut loose. If I'd fumbled this ball, everyone at Ares could've been completely screwed."

A.J.'s little laugh came again. "Have I mentioned that the two of you are redefining the expression 'odd couple'?"

"I can reach you, Mr. Baker."

"Enough. Pull, everyone," Rich said, straining at the beam.

There was a grating in Joe's earphones, then several grunts and a faint clanging noise. "That's got it. Poor Ryu."

"Has anyone tried raising Nike?"

"We will as soon as we get out of the wreck. Most of the systems are shut down right now."

Joe saw the others slowly emerge from the hole he'd made on his impromptu exit. Once more he was astonished that he was still alive. Either his suit had taken the impact with amazing resilience; or, more likely, the chair had spun as he went through the air and broken the window in front of him. He had no memory himself of the sequence of events involved. And then—which he also did not remember at all—the seat must have twisted around and absorbed most of the impact of his final Marsfall. However it had happened, he'd been incredibly lucky not only to survive, but with no injuries worse than a broken leg.

The five distant figures lowered a limp sixth to the dusty soil. "Rich, I know it doesn't mean much. But I think Ryu wouldn't mind being the first person buried on Mars."

Skibow was silent for so long that Joe was afraid he'd angered the other man again. Rich and Dr. Sakai had been very close friends.

Then he heard a sigh. "Yeah. You're right. If he were alive, he'd probably be tickled pink."

Bruce's voice broke in. "I've got the radio working again."

For a moment all four people on the Nike's bridge stared in disbelief. Then Jackie answered, her voice cracking with disbelieving joy. "Bruce? You're all right!"

"Well, yeah, it would seem so."

"Is everyone okay?" Ken Hathaway asked.

"I am afraid not, Captain," Madeline Fathom's voice responded. "Dr. Sakai did not survive the crash."

Jane, who had brightened immeasurably upon hearing Irwin's voice, closed her eyes and swallowed. She'd also been a good friend of the Japanese areologist.

Hathaway sighed. "Understood. I'll see to it his next of kin is informed, back on Earth. How is everyone else?"

"Joe Buckley has a broken leg—how bad we will determine shortly. He may also have a concussion. The rest of us seem to be healthy. But given that all of us apparently lost consciousness on impact, we must be alert for concussion as well."

"No 'apparently' about it, Madeline, unless you people have been awake for almost two hours."

"Not that long, no, although we have been active for some time. External links were being sent through John Carter's systems and, as those were no longer active, we had to get out of the shuttle before we attempted contact again. Before doing so, we extricated Dr. Sakai from where he had been pinned. Perhaps we should have attempted contact earlier, but . . . We just couldn't leave him there."

"Yes, I understand. What condition is John Carter in? And the supplies and equipment on board?"

"The lander is . . . a wreck. I'm not even sure it could be repaired in a real dry dock. We certainly can't. As for the other, we simply don't know yet. We'll need a few hours, I think, before we can give you a solid assessment of the state of our equipment."

"All right. The main thing is that most of you are still alive. I can't tell you how relieved we are."

"Yes. Fathom out."

Jackie sagged back into the chair. Alive. They're alive!

Then she stood up so suddenly she almost separated from the deck again. "Okay. So they're alive. But now we have to figure out how to keep them that way."

Satya Gupta nodded. "Indeed, Ms. Secord, indeed that is our next order of business. They will need supplies, beyond any doubt. It is our job to devise some method to get those supplies to them."

Hathaway frowned. "Can you get anything to them? We don't have any other atmosphere capable vehicles. In fact, we have damn few things worth calling vehicles at all, except Nike—which certainly can't make a trip down."

"Can we?" Gupta's voice sounded almost offended. "Of course it can be done! We have almost limitless energy, we have all the equipment of Nike, and we have the knowledge with which to do it. It can be done. It will be done, for it must be done."

Jackie nodded. "There's got to be a way, Captain. Our only real enemy is time. It depends on how long they can hold out. When Madeline reports back . . . Well, if they're so bad off all they have is their suit resources, I don't know. But if they can manage even a week or two . . . We'll find a way to send them what they need if we have to get out there and push it to Mars!"

* * *

Madeline, a tiny figure against the hulking backdrop of John Carter, began moving towards Joe. "I'll check Joe. Helen, give me a hand, would you? You're the only one here besides myself who has much experience with field medicine. Then we have to assess our resources. Our prospects are chancy, I'm afraid."

Joe understood what she meant. John Carter was the expedition's only surface-to-space vehicle. If they couldn't survive on the surface of Mars for quite a while, there wasn't a thing anyone on Nike could do to save them. "We may all join Ryu Sakai soon enough," he muttered.

"Not if I can help it," Madeline said briskly. "I said 'chancy,' not 'dim.' On the positive side, only one of us is injured, our suits are all in working order, and the filters and rebreathers will give us considerable functioning time before we have to worry about running out of air. So we're not in immediate danger. The key thing is the rover. If we can just get the rover out of the wreck, I think we'll have an excellent chance."

She knelt beside Joe and probed his leg through the suit. "A.J., can you verify a fracture using the sensors we have?"

"No problem, with both your sensors and his." After a moment he said: "Yep. Clean break, but it's not lined up right. The suit can be forced into rigid mode in that area, though, so if you can manage to set the bone, I can trigger a splint."

"That means she's going to hurt me, right?"

Helen had arrived by then, and smiled down at him. "Look at it this way, Joe. We only hurt the ones we love."

"Listen, mates, keep the foreplay private."

Madeline ignored the byplay, as she considered the situation. "I need to make sure you're still when I do this, Joe. The low gravity may make that . . . interesting."

She glanced around. "Okay. Since you're still in the seat and still strapped down, we may as well use that as a harness. Hold tight onto the armrests. Hopefully your weight and the seat's will keep you still long enough. Helen, do your best to keep him steady. I'd suggest grabbing his shoulders."

Helen did so. Joe got his arms locked around the armrests. "Go ahead."

"Ready, A.J.?"

"Say the word."

"Trying . . . now."

A blaze of white-hot pain stabbed up from the vicinity of his shin. Joe grunted or screamed, he wasn't sure which, but held on as the tension increased. He felt the chair quiver, and then suddenly felt something clamp firmly down the length of his leg.

"That's got it!" A.J. exclaimed. "Good work, Madeline. It's set and I've locked the splint down."

"How are you feeling, Joe?" There was concern in her voice now, unlike the flat and professional tone in which she'd spoken earlier.

"Be . . . all right, I think. Just let me rest a little, turn up the heat in my suit a bit, and get a drink. Minor shock, probably."

She brought up his biometric display on her suit HUD. "Yes. But you should be okay."

"I'll key an alarm in, just in case." A.J. said. "Joe, you just rest until you're sure you're up to moving."

"Don't worry, I'm not dumb. I'll sit here and admire the view."

A.J. paused. "Yeah. That's a hell of a view."

Sharply defined against the light pink of the horizon sky, only slightly softened by the distance, the five-kilometer-high walls of Valles Marineris reared their impenetrable bulk. It was the greatest canyon in the Solar System, and looked the part. The scalloped, gully-ridged sides demarcated an uncrossable barrier. Between the atmosphere-softened light and traces of dust or sand in the air, the distant surfaces seemed to have a dreamlike patina of lighter shades of rose and pearl.

Other, lesser ridges jutted at intervals like rocky knife edges, barring any direct route across the bottom of the mighty canyon. Dust and sand and rocks covered the floor of Valles Marineris, the latter mostly rounded from tumbling in the long-vanished waters and from millions of years of low-pressure sandblasting. Though the predominant colors were reds and pinks and oranges, there was a profusion of other colors, as well. White splashes on some areas; dark, almost black sands and gray-black rocks; a shocking glint of yellow, flashes of light from feldspar or quartz or mica. It was a wild, utterly untouched view, under an alien sky without a contrail or a cloud or any sign of life other than themselves. Joe felt it finally sinking in that he was actually, truly, and really on Mars, the first human being ever to touch the soil of the Red Planet.

He just hoped he wasn't about to end up the second person buried there.

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