Dark Secret (2016) by Edward M. Lerner

Author:Edward M. Lerner [Lerner, Edward M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781612423227
Google: _mJcvgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1612423221
Publisher: Phoenix Pick
Published: 2016-08-07T21:00:00+00:00

25

Dead tired, Dana swung her pickaxe up over her head. It came down, clang, on the unyielding ground. A few sparks flew, and bits of gravel.

From starship captain to manual laborer in one week and one easy lesson.

Despite morning chill and a stiff breeze off the newly dubbed Darwin Sea, sweat ran down her face and neck and plastered her shirt to her back. Knees, hips, shoulders…was any joint in her body not in agony from the extra weight hung on her by Dark’s gravity? Certainly the damned pickaxe weighed a tonne. Taking a rest break every ten minutes and whenever she felt lightheaded, she had managed, so far, to forgo a breather mask.

Headache, dizziness, insomnia, and lack of appetite: she could be the poster child for altitude sickness. Tough. She told herself they had higher oh-two pressure than any Tibetan.

Trying to forget that Tibetans were no more.

Once again, the world spun around her. Dana laid down her pickaxe, carefully, before she hurt anyone with it. She sat on a boulder to wait out the vertigo. The blue-green sky made her queasy, too. She wished she could remember how long Mars’s red sky had taken to come to seem normal. Years, she guessed.

Blake, nearby, wielded his own pickaxe. The result so far—as in her case—was more dimple than hole. But pickaxes were easier to fabricate than jackhammers.

Among untold gaps in Marvin’s knowledge, rock blasting was the first to bite them. How much explosive would they need? How deep should they plant the explosives? How far apart?

Dropping his pickaxe, Blake wiped his forehead with a sleeve. His beard (all three men had started one, for warmth) remained scruffy. “This is a lot of work on an empty stomach.”

“Nonsense,” she said, shuddering. “We had gruel.”

He stooped to reclaim his tool. “You always could motivate me.”

Dana wished he hadn’t reminded her of breakfast. Pond scum à là Carlos. According to every test Carlos and Li had devised, the reformulated slop was safe—

And with each mouthful Dana channeled old mystery novels. Arsenic poisoning was not how she wanted to go.

Dark’s biology, what there was of it, in many ways resembled Earth’s. So, anyway, her experts told her. Both biochemistries relied on DNA and proteins. Both used twenty-two amino acids, most of them in common. And when they differed? Dana didn’t know one amino acid from another, anyway.

But she could not get past arsenic taking the role of phosphorus in terrestrial biochemistry.

With every swallow, she wondered how complete was the process of removing arsenic and inserting phosphorus in its place. Maybe only the merest trace of arsenic stayed behind. A little poison with every morsel….

With renewed vigor, she attacked the rocky ground. These excavations were the first baby step toward farming.

*

“Fire in the hole!” Dana called.

Two meters distant, behind his own hulking granite boulder, Blake covered his ears.

She flipped the toggle on the detonator.

The sharp blam! was a satisfying conclusion to a morning at hard labor. Or would be, if they’d done it right.

The patter of gravel slowed, then stopped.

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