Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (18 page)

“Were all these slides from one core sample?” asked
West
.

Casey hung her head.

“That’s an awfully small sample to draw a conclusion from.”

“The only conclusion I’ve drawn, is that there
is
an anomaly.”

There was a clanking and a whirr as people entered the airlock. The bobbles had come home.

“From now on, Lieutenant Casey, you’re under direct management, and that means you will be micromanaged. I can get the reference to the protocol, if you like, but believe me, my order will hold.”

Airlocks were still a slow process, though they’d sped up considerably since the early days of
Lunar
colonization. What used to take hours now took twenty minutes. But sometimes it was a very long twenty minutes. And while West waited, the crowd gathered again.

The antechamber to the airlock was not built as a piazza. It couldn’t hold audiences for speeches, especially with six occupants in suits. West decided to simply rely on the pressure of numbers to drive out those near the door; that way he didn’t have to decide who was worthy and who was not to stay. In the end, he didn’t even have to rely on that.

Only one person came in, clad in armor. The helmeted head turned to take in the crowd. The camera lenses gave the impression of the eyes of a nocturnal creature. In fact, the lenses just cast what they saw onto a screen on the inside of the helmet. That way there was one less opening in the suit that could rupture.

Clamps released and the helmet came off revealing the face of Aoki.

“Couple of capacitors
are
gone. We can rig an ammonia battery, but it would be better if we could do phosphorus-neon. With that we’d have a closed system with only energy for input-output. If we use ammonia we’ll need a constant supply of it and we’ll use a lot of energy just maintaining the system.”

There was a low rumble and hiss as voices around the room played Chinese whispers and American mutterings.

“Given the phosphorus-neon batteries, we can bypass most of the problems with the capacitors.
As an estimate — but I’m pretty confident about it — we’d be able to sustain four people, maybe five.”

The Chinese whispers stopped. The American mutterings continued. It didn’t take long for the noise to swell. West thought of shouting them down but then came up with a better plan.

“Aoki,” he said loud enough for everyone to hear but too softly for anyone to hear comfortably. Then he lowered his voice a little more. “When will the buggy be ready for occupation?”

Aoki gave his answer, put on his helmet, and went back into the airlock. Behind him the antechamber grew quiet.

“When will the buggy be ready?”

“Should have listened instead of talked, shouldn’t you?”

Commander Howard West walked out of the antechamber. It wasn’t exactly a piazza, but it could be just as useful. He’d remember that if he ever ran for a place in Government.

In his quarters, Susan Green was still sleeping. Overpopulating the buggy had people looking for a quiet place — and sometimes just
another
place. Three cramped levels, all with low ceilings, gave everyone a wanderlust that couldn’t really be filled. He wouldn’t wake Green, so he decided to head to Console.

Console was called Command Deck by Earth Headquarters, though Earth’s terminology was being steadily replaced as the mission went on. With its large view ports forward and to the sides, Console was where the buggy was driven. The windows, of course, were redundant. Readouts and ground sonar did more to find hazards than mere eyes ever could. Since they weren’t moving at the moment, West figured the driver’s seat should be free.

Should be
.

As soon as Commander West walked in, the room fell silent. There were five in the room, two more than standard on a stationary night watch.

“Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping, Commander?” asked Lieutenant Commander Bruno Laurer.

“Green is borrowing my bunk. I didn’t want to wake her.”

“So that’s where she goes. She’s not been in her assigned bunk since she and Ellison had a dust-up weeks ago. Hazard of sharing bunks, I guess. Still, Ellison holds grudges.”

“If you knew about that, you should have taken it in hand. There are protocols to handle this sort of thing,” said
West
. “I’ll not have bullying in my command. I’ll talk to the two of them, but you should do better than some Earth manager covering his own ass.”

“Ellison will take it out on you.”

“Then she wears a suit and walks to the next site,” said
West
.

“Can I do something wrong? I could use the alone time.”

“Shut up, Reesman. You and Yorkston shouldn’t even be here; active duty isn’t time for socializing.”

The two left sheepishly.

“I need a console,” West told Laurer. “Why don’t you go relax or
sleep.
”

Laurer slid out of his seat and West slid in. Face recognition let him log on.

He accessed Casey’s core samples, overriding her lock and no doubt triggering any number of warnings for her that someone hacked into the system. This time he didn’t want to just look at slides, he wanted to know how she’d generated the samples in the first place.

The slides did indeed all come from one core sample because she drilled only once. But if it had been ground, as protocol required, the quantities of elements would still have been an anomaly.

West double-checked the figures. The anomaly was present in both the core sample and the surrounding sand. But it was more extreme in the core. West checked weather patterns, which on Mars were still not well understood. What readings had been taken could be interpreted to mean the south polar winds were isolated. Sands made here largely stayed here. Of course, there would be some mixture of sand from elsewhere — that couldn’t be stopped entirely. So if contamination reduced the amount of anomaly in the sand, then finding more of it in intact stone meant one thing. They had found some kind of singular deposit.

West hadn’t realized how long he had been working until the console pinged him that Earth Headquarters had sent him a message. It was plain text, which was always a bad sign. If the news were good, or at least exciting, someone would want their face on camera in case the media picked up on it. West read the file:

The following names are unsuitable for features of Mars.

These names will be deleted.

Please amend and reply immediately.

Commander West replied that he confirmed all fourteen names and reminded Earth Headquarters he had the unilateral authority to name all features. He had to compose a hack on the fly, but he managed to contact several news sites for whom the text would confirm prejudices one way or the other. If they made a meal of it, they’d use up all their space exploration news on names and not anomalies in sand and core samples — at least for a few days.

West turned around to find Schmidt standing behind him. He wondered how long he’d been there.

“Buggy A is not restored, but we have enough extra power that we can run scrubbers and sustain two, maybe three, people who don’t mind being alternately sweaty and freezing cold.”

“Is that during travel or when stationary?”

Schmidt thought. “Keep it two and it can handle both without problem.”

“Is it going to stink as much as this place?”

“No.”

And that concluded all the important details.

“OK, give me the calculations and I’ll send them to Earth.”

“You don’t trust my calculations?”

“Even if we don’t like protocols, we have to obey them for now.”

Technically, West knew he should put Schmidt over on Buggy A; he’d repaired it, after all. But Schmidt tended to run his own agenda and needed outside direction to keep him focused.

Schmidt left, perhaps sensing West’s thoughts. West looked at the console. Pings were still coming through. Once, the only indication of an incoming message was a little icon of an envelope, but that wasn’t annoying enough for Earth Headquarters, which wanted immediate replies to messages that would take over half an hour to travel between Earth and Mars.

West relented and called up the screens required. Earth Headquarters was having serious objections to his vivid names.
Strange, since his last message could not have gotten to Earth, yet.
Clearly somebody had seen the original list and was picking up on it.

He looked at the clock. Without realizing, it he had been awake for more than a Martian sol. It was only about forty minutes longer than an Earth day, but it could suddenly be a long time to stay awake. He put his elbow on the console and his head in his hand. When West finally woke up it was better than twenty minutes later and, if anything, he felt worse.

West looked at his wrist before he remembered he had not worn a watch since before launch. Weight limits really were that tight. And so, he realized, were the limits to his patience. He logged out and marched to his office. Before he could yell, he realized Green had already gone. Indoors all the time, it was easy to lose track of how much time was passing.

He unfolded his bed from the wall and easily jumped the four feet to land among the rumple of sheets he should have already changed. He was asleep almost instantly.

Awake took longer. There were images to explore and dreams to remember. He did not feel energized, so he guessed his dreams hadn’t presented him with a solution to anything. He got the local time from the computer. He’d slept for over nine hours. Despite his talk that everyone would crash eventually, it was his first breach in the months since the Buggy A disaster.

West breathed deeply. He didn’t know why they put an extra scrubber on his vented air, but he was grateful. It cut most of the smell of other human bodies. Buggy A would probably smell bad, but at least it would smell bad different. The smell there, though, wasn’t his main concern. Why were the estimations of how many it could hold so different?
Somewhere between two and five people?
A lot of rubber in those figures.

He jumped down and pushed the bunk up against the wall. It would be yet another week now before he could wash the sheet and pillow case. That would be Levinsol in the Martian week. Since he was supposed to have Levinsol, Zubrinsol and Clarksol off, he should have been happy, but he wouldn’t be getting the time off given current circumstances. West checked the tablet in his room while he had the chance. He’d collected a lot of pings. People were arguing who should get to transfer to Buggy A, most of the suggestions being extended versions of
me.

Earth Headquarters was still objecting to the names West had sent for geographical features, and the tone of the messages was becoming angrier. West checked the select websites that were automatically sent to the buggy and noticed a lot of support had coalesced for the new names. The support had named itself the Spread Legs Gulch Convention after the gulch the United States Government still refused to mention on its maps. West decided the United States was a culture with too much time on its hands, largely because it had grown allergic to work.

“Damn.”

Green had done more work while he and Casey were scheduled for sleep. Following protocol, she had notified him. The core sample slides had been sequentially numbered. Green had taken the deposits and linked them up to get a three-dimensional image of the deposits as a whole.

Clearly this wasn’t happenstance. The deposits were tapered at either end and expanded in the middle. It wasn’t universal, but it was common enough to be the norm. What that meant,
West
couldn’t tell. Geology wasn’t his specialty.

The coding of sample slides and providing a three-dimensional image of them was such a standard procedure, even
West
knew about it. Why hadn’t Casey already done it?

Then he realized she almost certainly had. Protocol demanded it and these results could only advantage her case.
Unless, of course, she had something so much stronger that sequencing seemed petty by comparison.
But if she had killer evidence, why was she keeping it a secret? There were several reasons why Casey might want to keep her powder dry, and from West’s point of view, none of them were any good. The time had come to pay her a visit.

The tablet told him she was at the Cranberry dig site. Hack name. West did
his own
hack and checked the code. It was designed so the computer would assign the results to another site. So she didn’t want the data secret, just secret from him. That could mean she just wanted to be able to sell something once they got back to Earth. But that didn’t sound like Casey. Certainly she was greedy for recognition and to be proved right, but money had never been her priority. She was like a panther, hunting things down and toying with them, like the big cat she was.