Life and Death on Mars by Edward M. Lerner

Author:Edward M. Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CAEZIK
Published: 2023-11-12T06:17:04+00:00

Flying an outward-spiral search pattern, the drone encountered Paula’s head and helmet. No longer together. Neither intact.

Fighting a shudder, Teri asked, “Can the drone recover anything from the helmet comp?” Camera feed, perhaps. Last words still in a comms buffer. Anything to shed light on what had happened.

“Not a chance,” Keshaun said. “Not from here, anyway. The battery pack is … elsewhere. Even if I had the helmet in front of me, I don’t know. It looks pretty well shattered.”

Reuben, meanwhile, expression grimmer than ever, his face gone pale, continued the struggle with his counterpressure suit.

She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Reuben, hold on.”

He shrugged off the hand. “Jake’s still in Valles Marineris. Gotta be. We wouldn’t see this much cable unless it had been well extended before breaking.”

Maybe they were seeing a kilometer of snarled cable. Hell, maybe even two. The canyon at that spot was a good seven klicks deep. In this pathetically thin atmosphere, once the cable snapped, it’d be like falling in a vacuum. Given the planet’s low gravity, a fall accelerated slower than on Earth, but (quick mental calculation) from “only” a kilometer above the canyon floor, Jake would have reached 100 klicks per hour by the time he … arrived. Sixty damned miles per hour. Faster still if the cable had snapped with him farther from the ground.

Mouth and throat bitter with bile, Teri almost puked. Again. Mission commanders do not puke, she told herself. (Uh-huh. But wives do. Even rejected wives.) “Does the drone have the range to search the canyon floor?”

“Not sure.” Keshaun pulled up a spec sheet. “I can take the drone down and search for, best guess, twenty minutes. After that, it’ll need a full day’s recharge to make it back up.”

“Do it,” she said. The possible loss of a drone was the least of her concerns. “Reuben, go ahead and see if either ship is up for the trip. Ample LH2 and LOX, redundant everything, clean bill of health from the diagnostics. The works. Let me know what you find. Channel nine. But do not launch without my authorization. There’s no mission without confirmed life signs.” Because I’m not going to lose you, too.

With a grimace and final tug, Reuben forced the injured leg all the way into the tight suit leg. “Got it.”

The drone’s descent was interminable, its relayed view a blur. With the quadcopter not yet halfway to the valley floor, Reuben, fully suited, went out the airlock. Maia radioed, asking why Reuben was outside. Why he wasn’t responding on the common channel. Why he had waved her off when she approached, had boarded a ship.

Somehow, Teri found her confident, boss voice. “It’s a drill, Maia, but time-sensitive, so please don’t interrupt him.” Or me.

In a meandering spiral, buffeted by random wind gusts, the drone descended. Until—

“I see something!” Keshaun called.

A red so vibrant to be foreign even to this world. It looked to her as if Jake had been spared the meat grinder of flailing cable.

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