Life in a Moment: Ten Flights into Darkness by Maxey James

Author:Maxey, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Word Balloon Books
Published: 2024-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

Queen of Mars

I was dangling by my fingers from the cliff. The dust swirling from the rockslide obscured the ravine below me. Maybe there was a ledge a few centimeters below my boots, or maybe there was a five-hundred-meter drop onto jagged stones. Even in Martian gravity, a fall like that would be fatal.

My rebreather monitor dipped toward red. Air farted through the rip in my suit. I needed to keep calm to save what was left of my oxygen. Yeah, right. I was sucking down air in huge gulps.

“Calling Blueford Habitat! This is California Lee!” I shouted. “Cali!” I don’t know why I thought it was important to add my nickname. There are, like, a hundred people, tops, at Blueford, and I’m the only fourteen-year-old girl. Everyone knows me. “A cliff sheared off beneath me! Send help! Help! Help!”

I screamed, “Help!” three or five or twenty times until my panic ran its course. There was no response from Blueford. Helmet radios aren’t strong enough to get a signal all the way up to a satellite. My radio pairs with the sat-phone on my bike and, of course, my bike was at the bottom of the ravine.

“Mom, I’m sorry,” I said, knowing that my helmet video was still recording. “I shouldn’t have lied to you. I should have said where I was going with my bike! But you would have said no, which wasn’t fair, since I…” My voice trailed off. Why was I arguing with Mom in a message she’d see only after they found my mangled corpse?

I started to speak again, a short, simple, “I love you, Mom,” but my voice caught in my throat. A shadow moved across the edge of my vision. I craned my neck and saw it was Deimos! My cat flittered down on those weird wings of his, coming in for a landing next to my fingers on what was left of the ledge. He stared at me, like he was curious as to what, exactly, I was up to.

“Deimos!” I yelled. “Fly down! Find my phone!”

Deimos didn’t fly down. He twisted his body and started licking the edge of a wing.

“Deimos! Please! Don’t act like you can’t understand me!”

Deimos stopped licking his wing and gave me that cat look of, “Why are you bothering me with your mouth sounds?”

My jaw tightened. I was going to die because of my stupid cat.

Or, you know, because I was making stupid choices. I don’t mean biking up the cliffs of the Valles Marineris. On my bike, I’m Queen of Mars! Since I’ve got the only mountain bike on the planet, there’s not much competition for the title, but still. No, the stupidity here was wasting air screaming into a dead radio, and asking a cat to be helpful.

The breach was in the right armpit of my suit, judging from the farting noise. For understandable reasons, I was clinging to the cliff with both hands. I forced myself to let go with my left hand. My

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