Mars Fire - Chapter XLV - Sol 18

Previous Chapters: Chapter I , II , III , IV , V , VI , VII , VIII , IX , X , XI , XII , XIII , XIV , XV , XVI , XVII , XVIII , XIX , XX , XXI , XXII , XXIII , XXIV , XXV , XXVI , XXVII , XXVIII , XXIX , XXX , XXXI , XXXII , XXXIII , XXXIV , XXXV , XXXVI , XXXVII , XXXVIII , XXXIX , XL , XLI , XLII , XLIII , XLIV

Thursday morning was a blur for Burrows: he rose to an empty apartment, Tilda already back at Botany for their escalated project, and barely had his breakfast down before heading out to the Machine Womb again. The mission planning session the previous night, with the rest of Dust Team 5, had run until well past midnight, and the first thing that greeted him when he entered the workshop was the stack of used cups and food containers still piled on one of the cabinets next to the door. The main planning board which they had used for their notes and mission outline was a black-and-grey slab on the opposite side of the control area, schematics and lists covering it in a spidery red scrawl from there they had puzzled out the planned approach to the problem at hand.

Burrows threw himself back into his work once he had confirmation that the planning board had saved everything, and was halfway done with the next sensor mast when Dixon finally joined. The long-haired tech specialist had his big compad in hand again, and sported a clean-shaven chin after the thick fuzz that had dominated the past few days after the patrol.

“I got the data permissions from Mekkels.” Dixon waved the compad in the air before plunking it down on his workbench with a triumphant grin. “Now Command can finally get off my back about the damn Clarke uploads, and I can get back to work!”

“Have they found anything interesting in the rest of the data yet?” Burrows had a pair of screws in one hand and an auto-torque in the other, and barely spared a glance at Dixon. The components on the mast were small, and prone to misalignment if one stopped paying attention at the wrong moment.

“No word yet. I shared the atmospheric sniffer data with Berube yesterday, and he said he’d have a look. Those radiation profiles we got on the second day, I want to share with Thornton. He and his mining people know radiation better than anyone else.” Dixon made himself comfortable at his workstation, and began tapping away at the controls. Burrows turned his attention back to his work, and it was many minutes later when he finally noticed that the clacking of keys had stopped.

Dixon was staring off into space when Burrows looked up, head aimed at one of the screens but his eyes focused on nothing. He had a slight frown on his face, brows wrinkling together ever so slightly, and Burrows had to call his name twice before his eyes refocused and he came back from wherever he had been.

“What’s the matter with you?” Burrows had stopped working the first time he called Dixon’s name, and now put his tools the rest of the way down. “You looked like you were a million miles away there for a bit.”

Dixon shook his head, and just looked down at his keyboard. Burrows could see his one hand, next to one of the controllers, shaking ever so slightly.

“I haven’t spoken about my brother since he died. This war hasn’t even started yet, and it’s already bringing back bad memories.” Dixon’s face was hidden behind his long hair, and his voicebox, as always, masked whatever he was feeling.

“What was his name?”

Dixon was quiet for a while after the question, and Burrows was on the verge of letting it go and turning his attention back to the mast when the other man finally spoke.

“Forrest Franklin. Married, two kids. Lived out in Brazil, in one of the Liber zones.” Dixon paused, shook his head. “Was married. I don’t even know where they are now.”

“You didn’t stay in touch with his family?”

“No. His two boys look just like him. When I see them, I see my brother.” Dixon looked up again, eyes on the screen in front of him, yet clearly seeing something else. “I just couldn’t handle it after the accident. His wife also blamed me for inviting him to Mars, said he would still have been alive if it wasn’t for that trip.”

Burrows flinched at that comment.

“That’s not a fair thing to say, to be honest. You know you’re not responsible for what happened.” Burrows sorted through a pile of screws, looking for a particular gauge, before turning his attention back to Dixon. As much as he wanted to finish the work on the mast, he knew that Dixon needed the attention more. “That collision would have happened regardless of what we did, or who was on the Indigo. You have to know that.”

“Rationally, yes. Emotionally though…” Dixon shrugged, and pushed his dark hair back from his face and behind his ears. His eyes were glistening. “Forrest was the only person who ever really understood me, back on Earth. He was born five minutes before me. Insisted on calling me his little brother even after I could kick his ass. He wore a pink shirt in solidarity for three whole months after I came out to our parents. He…”

Dixon’s words choked off, and Burrows saw tears on his cheeks before his hands covered his face. Silent sobs shuddered through the man as Burrows got up, and by the time he was behind Dixon he could see the tears splattering on the desk between his elbows. Dixon’s shoulders were shaking when Burrows placed his one hand on them, and they stayed like that for several minutes before Burrows could feel the shuddering start to taper off. Burrows eventually stepped back and dropped into one of the nearby chairs, and just waited.

“I miss him so much, and I know I will never get to see him again.” Dixon’s voice was soft from behind his hands, which still covered his face. “I’ve spent years on the nets here, looking for people who survived accidents and lost their memories in the process. Hoping for some miracle that he survived, and ended up down here somewhere without his memories. Just waiting to be seen, and recognised. As much as I know it’s crazy, I still can’t help myself. Whenever I see an article from that time, I have to look. I just have to.”

“I sometimes see people I used to know back on Earth. Just the faces, for an instant, and then when I look again I realise it’s someone else.” Burrows thought back to Africa, and the people he had known there. The people he had seen bleeding out in the dust, flies already swarming. “It’s a weird thing. It’s like a part of your brain wants to see something that isn’t there, and the rest of your brain doesn’t quite catch it in time. It can really mess up your day when you suddenly think you saw someone that you know, at a rational level, isn’t around any more.”

Dixon wiped his face with his hands, wet streaks across his cheeks and nose, and sniffed hard before looking at Burrows.

“Who did you lose?”

“People I worked with. Not family, but as close as you can get without a paternity test.” Burrows felt a wry smile twisting across his face. “It messes with you, that’s for sure. It also helped me to focus a lot, afterwards. It made me realise what was important. What was worth fighting for. A lot of small things become very irrelevant very quickly once you get to that point.”

“It’s been nine years, Jack. I tried to forget, in Golden Bough, but…” Dixon tapered off, and spread his hands in a shrug. There was a final teardrop on the tip of his nose that he brushed away almost angrily. “It still hurts. It still feels so damn raw.”

“It’s always going to hurt. Probably for the rest of your life. Nothing I can tell you now is going to change that.” Burrows got up, and laid his hand on Dixon’s shoulder again. “You just need to decide what you’re going to do with that pain, and where it’s going to take you. Up or down - that’s your choice.”

Dixon looked down at his desk again, and wiped at the scattered droplets there while shaking his head.

“I tried down, for almost three years. It wasn’t great.” There was none of the usual humour in Dixon’s eyes when he eventually looked up at Burrows standing beside him. “I don’t want to come back here one day and start looking for your face on the net too. Or Reyn’s. Or even Pope. You guys are the closest thing I have to brothers now, and if the Union takes more of you…”

“I know. I think about losing Tilda, or coming back here and having to explain to Kayla that Reyn is not coming back, and my heart wants to stop. Or telling little Jason that his adopted dad is not coming back, that Pope is now just an increment on a casualty tracking board somewhere.” Burrows gave Dixon’s shoulder a last squeeze before dropping his hand. “Or telling Ian that he has inherited all your cologne. Just imagine that.”

Dixon snorted, then snorted again and shook his head. A smile began to creep over his features again as he pulled his hair back.

“You ass. You know he doesn’t need the cologne.” Dixon tied his hair back with an elastic before dropping his hands to the controllers again. “It better all go to Pope, else I’m coming back to haunt every single one of you unscented barbarians.”

Their work resumed after that, and Burrows kept an eye on Dixon as he continued with the mast assembly, but the bout of melancholy appeared to have passed. The tech specialist spent the rest of the morning tapping away and frowning at his screens, and eventually started muttering about bandwidth issues just before lunch.

“I need to go deal with these upload issues, everything is taking longer than it should.” Dixon pushed his chair back and stood, stretching briefly before grabbing his compad. “If I don’t make lunch, tell Pope he’s a rockhead.”

“Now why would I do that,” Burrows muttered to himself as Dixon left with the compad in one hand and a stack of the used cups from the night before in his other hand. The only reason he could think of was the mining simulation being run by Thornton’s office - and the fact that Dixon was complaining about it, meant that it was probably still not done.

As expected, when lunchtime arrived, Pope sent a message that he was still occupied in the mining area, and Burrows found himself to be the first one entering the kitchen area at Admin One. There appeared to be more people than usual in the dome, and after securing a bowl of spicy rice from the counter, Burrows ran into Vera from Accounting. Her singlesuit was a pale blue today, and she had a compad tucked under her arm.

“Jack.” Her greeting nod was curt, and Burrows could see, by the tightness of her eyes and mouth, that something was on her mind. “Have you seen the news this morning?”

“Vera.” Burows nodded back. “I have not, no. I must confess that I switched off a bit after the Union started blasting that rubbish about us being stone-throwing barbarians.” Burrows scanned around for an open table, but found none in sight. “Is there something I should be looking out for?”

“The council in New Hopetown has released some articles of its own.” Vera inclined her head towards the nearest of the wall-mounted screens that interspaced the circumference of the dome. Burrows noticed the clusters of people that were grouped around most of them. “The biggest one is a documentary about the fall of the Seven Craters Federation. Your friend, Fred, is in it.”

Pope, in a documentary?

The pieces clicked into place a moment later for Burrows.

“I’m assuming they’re focusing on survivor accounts? People who lost families, that sort of thing?”

“Exactly. A lot of it, from the people who managed to get out, or were outside when it happened - like Fred. Most of the accounts were recorded just after it happened.” Vera gave a clipped, professional smile up at Burrows. “I would appreciate it if you could check in with him. These might be trying times for him.”

“I’ll be sure to do so, and I’ll pass along your regards.” Burrows inclined his head with a short smile of his own, and Vera disappeared back into the bustle of the kitchen area’s crowd the moment he lifted his head.

Now what exactly had she meant by that?

An open table appeared in the one corner of the eating area, and Burrows claimed it just before a gaggle of teenagers swept past. Occupied as he had been with Dixon’s revelation earlier that morning, Burrows had walked into the main dome without really paying attention to why the space was busier than usual - and now that he sat down, and started looking at the screens scattered around the space, he could see how the screens had snagged the attention of the passing colonists. If there was counter-propaganda coming out of New Hopetown, then hopefully people would pay attention and start making plans about how to handle the future.

Of course, given how averse most of the Liberty Zone citizens were to government interference and dictates, this ploy probably also had a fair chance of simply not working.

That thought took Burrows down another line of reasoning: why should the Bear State citizens believe their own government propaganda - for it was, honestly, little more than propaganda at this point in time, given the timing of the documentary’s release and the associated political developments - and disregard voices from outside? Was that not exactly how the Union also controlled their people, by constantly selling them fear and telling them to not trust outsiders?

“Mars to Burrows, Mars to Burrows - are you reading us, captain?”

Burrows looked up and found Reyn standing beside him, food bowl in hand and an amused smile across his face. The blond engineer was in one of his usual olive singlesuits, and Burrows had completely missed his approach.

“Loud and distracted, apparently.” Burrows shook his head and motioned for Reyn to take a seat. His own bowl of spicy rice still sat virtually untouched in front of him. “Sorry, I was just spacing out a bit. This propaganda war with the Union got me thinking, and clearly I should not be doing that on an empty stomach.”

“I heard about the documentary. We had fragments of it running on our lab screens this morning.” Reyn made himself comfortable and started tucking into his rice. “I don’t know if it will change any minds at this point. I think it will just cement people deeper into their existing views. The people who want to fight, still want to fight. The people who want to run, still want to run.”

“It has also been five years since Seven Craters fell. It’s not exactly a fresh lesson at this point.” Between spoonfuls of rice, Burrows watched the clumps of people around the screens shift, break up, and reform in different clusters. The news would travel through the colony at speed - exactly as intended. “Has anyone in your area mentioned plans to leave?”

“Nothing yet. There was chatter about it yesterday already, but most of them seem to understand that running now and becoming a refugee just means being a burden somewhere else. You can make more of a difference in your home territory than in a refugee centre. Who knows what the other colonies are thinking though.” Reyn stopped eating for a moment and used his spoon to point at the milling crowds. “Also, for most of them, it’s a strange world out there. Some of the people here have never even left Home One. There’s a lot of security in staying here, even if there is a risk of occupation.”

Burrows just shook his head at that. His own wanderlust had thinned out as he aged, but in his youth he had chafed at the idea of spending his entire life in a single place. The need to explore, to look over the horizon, to search for new adventure - it had driven him hard. Sometimes it flared up again, strong and poignant, when he looked over the virgin dunes of Mars at landscapes which no man had ever crossed before. Yet, no matter how far he traveled, he always met more people who were perfectly content with the familiar. People who wanted routine and schedules above all else.

“I wish we could take them out to those abandoned colonies around Marsden Mines, and show them what happens when the Union moves in.” Burrows looked at the remainder of the rice in his bowl, and wondered where his appetite had fled to. “Make them understand what happens when you don’t fight.”

“You mean, like showing them this documentary?” Reyn’s grin was short-lived. “I’m hoping that more of them volunteer for militia work, but that’s about the best we can hope for at this point.”

Ian showed up a few minutes later, blond hair sticking up in every direction, and was busy gulping down spoonfuls of rice even before he sat down at their table. He wore a black singlesuit instead of his usual white Euro ones, and there was a bulging tool belt strapped to his waist.

“I skipped breakfast,” Ian mumbled between gulps, and went right back to eating. Burrows shared a surprised look with Reyn.

“Looks like someone is working hard after all his time away. Did you go shopping over breakfast?”

“Sammy took my measurements after the patrol,” Ian replied to Burrows’ question, head shaking. “She told me I need to start dressing like a local, else people will always treat me as an outsider. I’ve been working since five this morning to get the first fish cultures ready.”

“Sounds to me like someone is busy marking her territory,” Reyn mused, and shared a grin with Burrows. Burrows had to suppress a snort. “You must have left quite an impression.”

“Hang on…” Ian’s eating stopped, and he squinted at the two grinning men around the table. “What does that mean? Is that a local custom, or something else?”

“Usually they wait until they’ve moved in before they start changing the way you dress,” Reyn quipped, and this time Burrows had to laugh. Ian’s face was comical as the realisation dawned.

“It’s a common thing here, yes, I guess you could call it a local custom. Tilda bought me my first singlesuit just about the same time that our relationship here became official.” Burrows sat back, still grinning, and pushed his half-eaten bowl of rice over to Ian. “It’s how the women mark their men. When you wear that suit, you’re basically sending a message to all the other girls that Sammy is your number one right now.”

“What if I just bought the clothes myself?” Ian looked suspiciously at the clothing he wore, as if seeing it for the first time. “What message does that send?”

“On its own, probably nothing. But since you’ve been spending time with Dixon, the women might start wondering about other things then.” Reyn hid his smile behind a hand, instead doing a convincing impression of a man deep in thought. Burrows knew him well enough to spot the glint in his eye, and what it actually meant. “Especially if he gifts you some cologne soon.”

“He hasn’t offered any, actually.” Ian finished emptying his own bowl and took the half-eaten bowl from Burrows without question. The suspicion was still writ large across his face when he looked up at Reyn again. “That’s a good thing, right?

“I think with Sammy busy telling everyone about her shopping trip, you should be in the clear for now.” Reyn pushed his own bowl away before leaning forward onto the table, arms crossed. “Have you talked to her about the time ahead?”

Ian chewed for a while before swallowing, eyes still on his food. Burrows could see his face shifting through a range of emotions, before finally settling on something that looked like resolve.

“We did, yes. She’s been helping me at the lab ever since we came back, and we’ve been talking a lot.” Ian looked up from his food, mouth set. “We’re going to take it one day at a time. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and we don’t want to make concrete plans for a future that might not turn out the way we want it to. So…”

“It’s sensible, I’ll give you that. You guys are still young, and there’s a lot of uncertainty ahead.” Burrows checked his wrist timer, and saw that it was heading into the afternoon. Of Pope and Dixon there was still no sight, and the cafeteria area was starting to empty. “As long as she can understand that, and as long as she has patience, you guys can make it work.”

“Have you talked to your family back home as well?”

Ian just shook his head at Reyn’s question.

“I don’t want them to worry. They already had a lot of concerns about me coming up here to Planckstadt, and when I left there I didn’t tell them. If I have to tell them everything now…” Ian trailed off into silence, before shaking his head again. “I guess I’m just not ready for that conversation. I don’t think my parents will understand.”

“You’ll have to deal with it eventually. Hopefully it’s a good story by the time it happens.” Burrows thought back to his own parents, growing old on Earth, and understood all too well where the younger man’s logic was coming from.

“I hope so. I’m hoping to tell them about Sammy too when all of this is over.” Ian’s smile was bright after the previous frowns. It faded a moment later when he realised what he had said. “If we get through it all, of course.”

“The best we can do is to be prepared. Everything else will happen the way it is meant to.” Burrows rose, and gathered up the remains of his meal. “And on that topic - we should get going with the patrol prep. There’s a lot to get ready before tomorrow.”

“I’ll come help. I need a break from the aquaponics work anyway.” Ian stood, followed by Reyn, and Burrows led the way to the cafeteria drop-off area. From there it was only a short walk to the tunnels leading to the vehicle hangars, the waiting Exeter, and the list of equipment they had drawn up the previous night.

Loading the CDM rover took the rest of the day, the hours disappearing in a seemingly endless session of packing, checking equipment, testing tolerances, stocking supply cabinets, and repeatedly packing and repacking their backpacks. Dixon showed up at some point, along with Pope, and everyone got stuck in with the work at hand. Freshly stocked after the last patrol, and barely depleted from the most recent run to Stockton, the Exeter instead found itself being emptied and repacked to accommodate the new mission profile.

The planning session the previous night had meticulously plotted out how they would approach the task at hand, and the realisation had soon dawned that their usual patrol preparations - as had sufficed for the previous trips to Marsden Mines - would be woefully insufficient for the extended duration and changed mission profile that now faced them.

For starters, their expected EVA time had increased from six days - four days walking, two days at the target zone - to ten days, which meant an almost doubling in the amount of food, water, energy and oxygen needed. There was only so much weight tolerance that a single man could carry in the Martian environment though, which meant weight tradeoffs had to be made. They had no need for battle sensors on this hike, so those were ditched in favour of more food packets and water. Swapping the one out for the other was not straightforward though, since the sensors were small and dense versus the bulky, lighter food supplies, and Burrows found himself swearing at the size of his backpack as they packed and repacked each unit to get the loadouts in an optimal arrangement. In addition to the increased food volumes, they also had to swap out their usual sleeping cocoons for heavy-duty units to survive the expected storm front - which necessitated even more weight and bulk.

Energy - in the form of precious max-cells - and water supplies remained a problem, and along with the planned demolition loads from the Gallows Zero bunker, these items were assigned to the robo-mule units which they had lugged back from the Fort O’Neill armouries. The robo-mules were effectively walking tables in shape and function, and various models had been used by Liberty Zone prospecting teams for years to haul heavy equipment over broken ground. In CDM use, they had performed a myriad of other, less scientific tasks. Painted in militia khaki swirls, with a flat face-like sensor cluster at the one end, each mule could fold itself up for storage and occupied slightly less space than a man when loaded into the cargo bay. They were chipped and scarred from years of use, yet gave green lights across all their diagnostics when Dixon and Reyn tested them.

Each of the mule units could carry upwards of two hundred kilos of cargo, and could navigate independently or in tandem with someone on foot, depending on their operating mode. It was an easy solution to assign the energy cells, water blocks and demolition packs to the five mule units - until the realisation dawned that at full load, the robo-mules would exhaust their energy packs after three days of walking, leaving them stranded on the return journey. Given their irreplaceable value, this was simply not an option.

What confounded the matter even more, was the decision to take grasshopper units along.

“Grasshoppers?” Ian looked suitably confused when Burrows first mentioned them, and followed him as he went to one of the larger shelves near the CDM bunker’s garage door. The air was chill around them, and their breaths steamed in the air despite the hours of sweat they had dumped into the pressurised space. “You can’t be talking about the insects, right?”

“They are mean and green - but no, not the insects.” Burrows found the shelf in question, and indicated for Ian to grab the handles on one of the large equipment crates that filled it. Together they hauled the scarred, black crate off the shelf and onto the bunker floor. Burrows decoded the locks before flipping the lid open. “Observe: the closest thing you can get to being a motorbike organ donor up here.”

The crate contained something that looked for all the world like a motocross bike, just minus the wheels. Instead, a rocket nozzle pointed backwards where the rear wheel should have been, and a set of collapsed steering vanes filled the space in the front. The whole thing had been painted an eye-searing shade of green, and the slogan “Ride And Die” had been painted in white on the one side of the frame.

“The official term is a Low-Gravity Rapid Extraction Vehicle, or Lo-GREV. We just call them grasshoppers, for obvious reasons. It allows you to take off in low gravity at high speed, and get the hell away from whatever or whoever is chasing you at that point in time.” Burrows showed Ian the controls, as well as the numerous tight-packed cushion bags that were stacked in the bottom of the crate. “The cushions get attached to the outside of the frame at key points, and deploy automatically once you get close to the ground again. A bit like airbags in a car. Landing is… fun, to say the least.”

“He’s lying. Landing is you hitting the ground and bouncing like a rubber ball,” Pope chipped in from the side, walking past with a box of equipment balanced on his one shoulder. “After your first hop, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you fly away with your lunch on the inside of your visor.”

“It can be a pretty rough trip, no lies there. You can use the steering vanes to keep your nose up and stay in the air for longer, but that comes with issues of its own.” Burrows flipped the lid shut again and motioned for Ian to grab the next, identical crate on the shelf. “The longer you stay airborne, the higher your velocity. That’s basic math for a simple rocket engine like this. The grasshoppers don’t have braking or parachutes once they’re going. So the further you travel, the harder your eventual landing is. Most of the time, we aim for small hops only. Short burst to get airborne, then drop down and bounce on your airbags. Then more throttle, another bounce, and so it goes. Just like a grasshopper.”

“It sounds a bit insane, to be honest. Who came up with this design?” Ian grunted as they swung more crates out, until there were five in total on the floor.

“Someone out in the Free Red State, apparently, from a sporting league they were setting up there at the time. We got them via CDM channels about four years ago after someone in Division Seven had the bright idea to use these for extractions.” Burrows chuckled as he remembered the original training videos from Carmac Base. “The units went through a couple of design iterations before they officially became these Lo-GREV models. Division Seven has never commented on how many broken limbs went into the prototyping phase.”

Diagnostics on the grasshoppers came next, and after checking their fuel lines and ignition sequences, the packing exercise continued. With a full load of batteries, consumables, demolition packs and a single grasshopper, each robo-mule could now support a single member of Dust Team 5 - except that they were still only looking at three days of operations, max. Leaving the robo-mules behind in the event of a hot extraction was one thing - but leaving them behind just because they ran out of power, would be criminally negligent.

Dixon raised the point that this mission would probably not require them to haul their waste with them, given that the veil of secrecy had been lifted on their general operations, and once that was factored into their calculations, the weight tradeoffs improved - marginally. Reyn then proposed leaving their solar charger kits behind, since they were too large to be used while walking, and even more useless once the storm hit on Monday - until Pope raised the point that they could drop some of the max-cells and have their solar kits deployed on the mules instead, which would lower their overall energy capacity but improve their recharge rates. The mules were big enough to carry the deployed solar kits on their backs, after all, and would get plenty of sun during the days they spent walking - as well as on the days they spent waiting at the observation point.

That suggestion also went into the calculations, and the weight tradeoff ticked upwards again even as the hours ticked past. Dinner-time came and went, and by the time the men finally had the problem solved, the night had passed into a new day.

Next chapter: TBC