Climbing Olympus

The big dva man heaved up the bloodied table and lurched toward Boris, but Boris snapped out of his daze and swung his titanium staff. Its arc caught the other man on the shoulder, cracking down and probably crushing bone. The dva man snarled, falling to one knee, and Boris kicked the side of his head with a flat, insulated foot. The dva man went down.

Then the two dva women rushed him. Boris stumbled back out into the darkness.

Outside, the burst pipe continued to howl as water and steam gushed through the ruptures. The air was thicker than ever before with cold steam, clogged with strangling vapor, making it impossible to breathe. Boris felt as if he were drowning in the dense mist. He could barely move, dragging his trembling legs one step at a time as he staggered toward the spraying water. His head pounded from the vise of pressure. Any second now his skull would crack like an eggshell.

Accustomed to the air and in their own element, the dva women went after him, wielding their sharp, crude weapons. Boris stumbled away.

The iron-oxide dirt at his feet turned to muck, freezing into slush as he ran. Though he could hear one dva woman yelling as she pursued him, he could make out nothing of the other behind him in the darkness. His eyes were still dazzled from the brilliant lights in the hut. The splash of illumination from the broken doorway did nothing but blind him.

Nikolas was dead. Boris could not comprehend it. Now we are only four.

Suddenly, silently, the second dva woman dove at the backs of his knees. Boris fell. She knocked him forward into the quagmire of icy mud under the broken pipe. The escaping water continued to scream just over their heads. She grabbed Boris’s neck, digging her knees into the small of his back. Droplets of frozen steam sprayed around them, enveloping Boris with its paralyzing coldness, so frigid he could actually feel it through his polymerized skin.

Wasting no energy on words or a roar of defiance, Boris lurched back to his hands and knees, forcing his adin muscles to do as he commanded. Struggling, he tried to find a way to hit his attacker with the metal staff, but she clung to him from behind.

The other woman reached him now, still screaming, still flailing with a steel wrench in her hand. A sunburst of pain exploded in Boris’s shoulder as she brought the sharp tool crashing down on his back, near the crease of skin that marked the implant of his second pair of lungs.

Boris heaved himself to his feet, clamping his lips shut and grunting. This was low gravity. He was strong. He could defeat these two dvas. Inside himself, he searched for the anger to give him strength, but it seemed to be fading away, running out like blood onto the ground.

The dva woman on his back tried to throttle him with her muscular forearm. Boris staggered backward, straining his leg muscles until they felt ready to rip, and slammed her into the jagged edge where he had broken the pipe. Precious water poured around her, around him, and finally the woman loosened her hold.

The other woman hurled her wrench at Boris, but it only nicked his calf as he turned and splashed away into the cold mud.

He used the titanium staff to regain his balance. The first dva woman, stunned and reeling from being hammered into the pipeline, lurched back out of the gushing water and came at him.

Boris whirled to see a figure standing in the doorway of the dva hut. For a moment, he thought it was Nikolas, still alive and coming to aid him—but the silhouette was too squat, too bearlike. This time it carried a long digging implement. The older dva man lumbered toward him with murder in his eyes.

In panic, Boris looked around, swung his staff in an empty whistling arc to ward off the dvas, and fled into the deep Martian night.

As he escaped, wheezing for breath and heading up to the blessed higher altitudes, the wailing water from the broken pipe sounded like a requiem for dead Nikolas.

RACHEL DYCEK (#ulink_d9a90496-4782-5303-9573-c33145b08b64)

THE GATHERING STORM LOOKED huge on the weather-sat images—minor by Martian standards, but more enormous than anything Earth had ever cooked up. A tidal wave of suspended dust particles and free-floating plankton, it marched across the face of the planet like Mongol hordes conquering the Russian steppes.

Rachel punched up the climate models and ran through the usual prediction algorithms. Evrani’s simulations always gave a slightly more conservative estimate than al-Somak’s, and the two meteorologists spent a great deal of time bickering about it. But the result was clear enough, even at such an extreme distance. At such incredible velocities the storm would arrive in two days, three at the most.

Rachel stared at the swirling image. It seemed a hypnotic eye, beckoning her like the back-of-the-mind yearning to jump that lurks behind an agoraphobe’s terror of heights. The storm was an inexorable force that would sweep all Earth politics—all of Rachel’s past—aside. Tempting. Perhaps the storm would hang in the air for months, preventing the lander from taking off and returning her to orbit, leaving Captain Rubens stranded on Phobos and waiting for the next launch window. That way Rachel could remain an extra half year on Mars—but she doubted that would happen. Anyway, it would be only a delaying tactic, solving nothing.

The storm seasons came half a Martian year apart, when the north and south poles alternately thawed or froze out great hunks of the atmosphere, but the terraforming efforts had thrown the weather patterns into turmoil. The last time Rachel had seen such an all-encompassing storm on the weathersat images was just before Dmitri Pchanskii and his dva team had been buried under fallen rocks in Noctis Labyrinthus.

She wondered if this storm presaged another disaster.

Moving with a lethargy she identified as sadness at ending her work—not with a bang, but a whimper—Rachel looked around the inside of the inflatable module. She wanted desperately to stay here with her dvas, to continue her work and be left alone, but she was also tired. Tired of the problems, tired of the interpersonal details she had to manage as commissioner, tired of everything.

On Earth it would be worse. Even well-meaning people would hound her, ask her for speeches, challenge her decades of work with innocent yet biting questions. Here at Lowell Base she had withdrawn over the last four months, knowing that Keefer was on his way. She felt alone and isolated … but it would be worse to be with anyone right now. She had not been close to Bruce Vickery in years, and she had found no real companion among the other fifty people at the base. She could not count even the dvas among her friends.

This morning the inflatable modules crackled with an empty white noise. All the other personnel were hard at work in their various labs, keeping schedules to fulfill the core tasks the UNSA assigned them. The air felt cold and bright, heavy with the deep chill that never seemed to leave, no matter how hard the solar heaters worked. Rachel rubbed her arms to generate extra warmth in her soft sweater.

She checked the roster to see where everyone was, punching in a request for a summary grid and a sketchy map of Lowell Base, the Spine, and surrounding environs. Evrani and al-Somak had taken the putt-putt to deploy a wide net of climatological sensors in preparation for the coming storm. The two of them jabbered at each other in a machine-gun babble of heavily accented jargon. With storm season approaching, they acted like children on New Year’s Day.

Bruce Vickery had taken Keefer and a handful of the new arrivals out in Schiaparelli to visit the solar-power collectors deployed on the Spine. A couple of the others began their orientation with the botanists and agronomists in the greenhouse dome.

The geology team had gone outside for a last sample-collecting expedition before the storm, which might keep them sequestered for weeks. Amelia Steinberg and her crew of maintenance engineers had suited up to double-check external seals on the modules. A handful of members who worked the off-shift slept in their quarters; a few used the recreational and exercise facilities.

Rachel Dycek, already phasing out her important duties, attended the communications center, staring at weathersat images and waiting for the radiophone to beep. Phasing out.

Useless. Unnecessary. You can’t teach an old commissioner new tricks. When a person’s work is over, what does she do? Rachel recalled old pensioners who had looked forward for decades to their retirement from the work force—and had then turned into pathetic wretches in rocking chairs, without the slightest idea of what to do now that they had no purpose in life.

Rachel looked around the empty module and saw nothing that interested her. She shuffled off to her quarters, refusing to glance out any of the windowports along the way. She was being too hard on herself, but she had no one to talk her out of her gloom, to pat her on the back, to cheer her up. Events had left her at a loss. All her life she had forged ahead with a drive, soaring toward orbit … but now the rockets had cut out and left her in free-fall, disoriented, with nothing to anchor her.

What was she to do now?

She would return to an alien home as a well-respected scientist and administrator. The public would give her false laurels. She would fill her days with celebrity banquets, lecture tours, writing memoirs, granting interviews. Charities would want her to endorse causes; corporations would want her to endorse products. Her face would appear on posters. Children would write letters to her. Talk shows would use her as a guest when movie stars and professional athletes canceled unexpectedly.

Tell us, Dr. Dycek, why do you think your projects were such dead ends?

The clipping on the wall of her quarters brought back the pointed reminders of what life could be like on Earth, how she would be treated.

“FRANKENSTEIN” DOCTOR EXONERATED OF CHARGES BY UN PANEL

Perhaps she would be better off exiled to Siberia, to live quietly in a place where others could not find her or bother her. She could probably request that.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Human memory retained the details of failure long after every success had been forgotten. Her accomplishments would be swept under the rug, the sweet triumphs relegated to footnotes in history books, until one day Rachel would just lie down, slit her wrists, and watch the bathwater turn as red as the sands of Mars. …

SECOND PHASE TO CONTINUE

With a burst of defiance that exhilarated her, she yanked the clipping from her wall. The protective polymer coating stopped her from ripping it to shreds, but she crumpled it as best she could and tossed it to the floor. A childish gesture, but it felt good for a moment. Only a moment.

This useless bemoaning of her circumstances was pathetic, she realized, but she could not stop it.

Rachel glanced around her quarters. Should she bother packing? The night before, after her discussion with Keefer, she had taken out some of her possessions and scattered them around the room, but left them in disarray.

She felt worse after sitting in her quarters, and she left them, wandering from one pressure door to the next, like a grandmother checking her family after everyone had gone to bed. But Rachel had never considered the Lowell Base personnel her family. The dvas were her children, and they were cut off from her by a barrier of air pressure and freezing cold.

She passed the rec room, hearing sounds of people attempting low-gravity Ping-Pong, laughing and trading good-natured insults. Someone else played an electronic game.

She kept walking. Her vision was focused into a narrow tunnel, muffled, with gray around the edges. Without realizing it, Rachel found herself back in the communications center. She slumped back in her chair and sighed. The air was cold enough that she could see a faint white wisp of her breath.

On a panel, she found an insistent red light flashing—an emergency circuit. She sat up quickly, her years of training and experience shunting the lethargy aside. She had no way of telling how long it had been activated; with her lack of attention earlier, it could have been on for hours. She muttered an insult to herself and squinted down at the indicator.

The signal came from one of the dva pumping stations. She ran the coordinates over in her mind, pinpointing its location. The dvas checked in regularly, but they rarely had anything to report. Something must have happened to them.

She touched the icon on the screen, linking up to their transmitter. “Yes? I receive you. What is the problem? Report!” With her other hand she punched up current status numbers for the pumping station and saw the severity of their problem. Water pressure had dropped disastrously in one of the pipelines, and the other had been shut off completely.

“Dva station, please respond! What has happened out there?”

She had to repeat the transmission three times before anyone answered. No picture formed on the screen, only a burst of black-and-white static. “Hello?” Rachel said again. “I am not getting an image.”