Mars Fire - Chapter IV, Sol 2
Serialized science fiction
Previous Chapters: Chapter I , Chapter II , Chapter III
Chapter IV - Sol 2 - Tuesday
Burrows woke early the next morning, half-remembered dreams of jungles and summer heat slowly fading as he took stock of his surroundings. His bedroom was a tiny affair - a double bed, some storage cabinets, and enough space to hang your feet off the bed - and he spent little time in it aside from sleeping. Unlike some of the colony scientists, who lived and worked in a single space which they rarely left, Burrows was outside the hab more often than not, and had never seen the need for a large bedroom. It seemed silly to him to have such a large space available - and then spend most of the day outside it anyway. The large bed was the only concession to comfort, after too many fumbling sessions on the lounge couch had convinced him and Tilda both that a remedy was needed.
The apartment floor was chill underfoot when he got up and went to the showers, and after a vigorous scrub under the water-jets - he had a two-minute allotment per day - he padded to the kitchen with a towel around his waist and started on breakfast. There were noodles left from the night before, which he reheated, along with a rice bun and some bean paste.
Tilda was a late sleeper, and would rise later when her schedule demanded it. Burrows munched through his portions, washed it down with a cup of electrolytes, and then made a start at cleaning the kitchen. Their household rule was simple: if one cooked, the other cleaned. He managed to get most of the appliances cleaned and back into their respective cubbies, although he had to leave the sleek noodle processor out on the counter. He had never seen it before, had no idea where it went, and suspected that it was not actually theirs either. Probably something that Tilda borrowed from one of the other botanists.
With the kitchen cleaned, he returned to his bedroom for a fresh khaki singlesuit, which he quickly pulled on and zipped up before slowly inching open the door to Tilda’s room. It was a warm, dimly lit space, filled with cabinets and working surfaces and scattered tools, and her e-terminal took up the entirety of the one wall. Her bed was a mass of blankets and pillows, faint outlines in the dark, and Burrows felt around for a head or arm before finally finding her face.
She murmured softly when he gave her a quick kiss, and then rolled over onto her other side, away from the hallway lights. Burrows took the hint with a soft laugh, and retreated back to the lounge, closing her door behind him.
Not a morning creature at all, that one.
From their module back to the main dome was a short trip, and he ran into only one face along the way - Hemina Packrisamy, also from Botany. Somewhere in her thirties, she was lanky and dark of skin, a first-generation Martian from Indian parents who had fled Union occupation years ago, and after a perfunctory greeting she got straight to the point.
“It’s that bloody dome at Botany Five. I am spending more time cleaning it than doing science in it,” she fumed, a compad in one hand and a case of samples swinging in her other hand. “Every second day, it is the same thing: go outside, get the brooms, and sweep sweep sweep. I feel like I am going out of my mind!”
They were both heading in the same direction. Burrows hmm’ed in agreement, not really caring to be drawn into the conversation, then pointed at one of the figures walking towards them just as they entered the main dome.
“I think you need to talk to Reyn then. He might have some capacity to design a cleaning setup for your team.” Burrows turned the point into a wave to catch Reyn’s attention, and the two men shook hands briefly once they met. Reyn John Heaney was a bit shorter than Burrows, with pale hair and a radiation tan to rival his own. A first-generation Martian in his early forties, he had somehow not manifested the increased height that most Martians had over Earthers like Burrows. He had an intense set of eyes, blue-grey and piercing, and locked them on Hemina once he released Burrows’ hand.
“Miss Packrisamy. A good morning to you.” Reyn gave the little head bow that he always did when talking to the other female settlers, and Burrows noticed Hemina’s cheeks darkened just a shade.
“Mister Heaney, always good to run into you.” Hemina tucked her compad into a thigh pocket and used her free hand to tuck an errant strand of black hair behind one of her ears. “I was just telling Mister Burrows here that I have some troubles at the Botany Five dome. He suggested that you might be able to help us.”
Her smile showed a great deal of teeth, and Reyn returned it almost immediately. Burrows raised a hand to scratch at the side of his mouth, where day-old stubble rasped - and also to hide the half-smile that had involuntarily started to creep across his face.
He knew.
“I’m sure I can be of assistance, somehow. Are you still happy with the irrigation grid upgrades we installed last month?” Reyn cocked his head sideways, maintaining eye contact with Hemina. “It was a quite challenging design to fit into your space constraints.”
“It’s been doing admirable work, we have no concerns. Your designs have never failed to impress me, or my team.” Hemina smoothed her hair back again, then gestured towards the sample case she was carrying. “I have some errands to sort out this morning, but perhaps over lunch…?”
“Certainly. I’ll meet you at your labs, again.” Burrows was not sure if the emphasis on the last word was intentional or imagined, but Hemina gave another smile, nodded in return, and then strode off deeper into the dome. Reyn’s gaze followed her as she walked.
Burrows waited until the woman was out of earshot before turning on Reyn.
“Really? You went there?”
“I went nowhere. She came to me. And then she came to other things.” Reyn smoothed the front of his dark olive singlesuit, and allowed a small smile to slip through. “Are we that obvious?”
“Depends who is looking. The botany crowd gossips a lot, you’ll have to be careful there.” Burrows could not keep a grin from his own face, and just shook his head. “What’s the news of the morning, aside from your escapades?”
“Nothing good, unfortunately.” Reyn’s smile disappeared, and he gestured towards one of the nearby monitors. “We got the news this morning, on the State band. There’s been another Jade-fall in the Western District.”
“Again? Where now?” The two men moved closer to the monitor, and Burrows placed his hands on his hips as he watched the infocharts and updates scroll past.
“Right across the main rail line in Schiaparelli. About halfway between New Hopetown and the western border,” Reyn replied. “They are still assessing the damages, but it looks like the line is completely wrecked. A debris field almost two hundred metres across, and Geiger readings beyond anything our equipment can handle.”
Burrows resisted the urge to swear.
“You know how this is going to look to Colonel Hayes and his spooks.”
“Oh yes, they will be very busy now.”
“It is also going to cause trouble at the gate station, now,” Burrows mused, running the scenario through his head. “With the rail line down, we now have… what, two roads and the gate left? That’s a big slowdown for the heavy cargo.”
“We could divert the rail traffic north to Rhodes and then go overland into Argos, but they have been dealing with Union raids for weeks now. I don’t think many of the haulers will want to take that risk.”
“And Argos never integrated their rail links with us, so that overland trip is going to be brutal.” Burrows worked through the mental map, picking and discarding options as his attention shifted. “We have the Nova Collective to the south, but they are out of the question. Their slow-gate went down a month ago, and their rail traffic used to flow north into our yards at Culheimer. We’re not getting help from that side either.”
“Their slow-gate is still down, by all accounts. They don’t like talking about it, but Colonel Hayes has reliable reports that they have been unable to reactivate it.”
Burrows had always been deeply uncomfortable with how dependent a large part of the Martian colonisation effort had become on the mercurial slow-gate technology. Pump a boatload of energy through some magnetic fields, use that to massage a fermium isotope mix, and you get a portal - a wormhole, a gravitic acceleration tunnel, whatever they called it - that lets you send people and goods at about twenty percent the speed of light. As long as you had line-of-sight with your destination gate, and enough energy to massage that fermium, you could send any cargo anywhere. Surface to orbit was a matter of split seconds, and from Mars orbit across to Earth took minutes, instead of the months and months that a spaceship had to spend crossing the same solar gulf.
“Did the State report spell it out in so many words?”
Reyn shook his head.
“Just the basics about timing and where it happened. Some people will figure it out once they start thinking about it, but it’s still early for now.”
“Some people will figure it out damn fast when their shipments start failing to go through as well,” Burrows mused, thinking of all the mining cargoes that flowed west of out their Liberty Zone. “A lot of those mining contracts don’t have the profit margin to use gate travel to get to the Euro colony. They are profitable by rail - or not profitable at all.”
“That’s a conversation that I need to have with Pope, and soon.” Reyn gave a grim smile, and pulled out his compad to check something. “I need to run. We still have a parking lot outside New Hopetown we can use for ore, so we are going to move as much as possible to that point and then get it on the rails the moment the repairs are done. I also need to hire more of the parking lots before the price goes up.”
“Talk to Accounting - Vera - about that. I think we have an emergency fund for events like that.” Burrows nodded to the other man, who returned the nod and then strode off without another word. Reyn’s focus would get it done before the news was cold in the rest of the colony.
Burrows let his own feet carry him through the main dome and towards the western engineering tunnels while his thoughts mulled over the news. Mars - the colonies, the mining, the terraforming efforts - was a fragile system of interdependencies that tried to balance human ingenuity and hard work against a merciless, cruel environment that would kill every single one of them if their attention lapsed for a moment. Mining work needed to ship cargo on time to get paid, so that resources - food, air, water, medicine, and a hundred other critical things that Mars could not yet supply itself - could flow the other way and keep the miners alive. No cargo meant no pay meant no supplies. A chink in that chain could destroy decades of work.
Was their own little slice of Mars that critical to the plan? Burrows knew it was not - they were one of the many Liberty Zones crammed into the areas between the mega-colonies from the Euros and NorAm and the Union, and their own contribution to the grander scheme was tiny at best.
But to the people who lived here, it was everything. Their contributions kept them alive. Their contributions allowed them to live and breathe on a planet that wanted them dead, to raise families in lands where the last vestiges of freedom still roamed, and to have the privilege to explore and map out a new world.
As long as every link in the chain kept working.
The engineering tunnels that Burrows entered followed the same layout as the vehicle park tunnels from the day before: a c-lock on the main dome perimeter led to a length of green corridor, after which an airlock - much larger than the vehicle park one - cycled him through into a yellow corridor lined with a fine copper mesh on the inside. Burrows had asked about the mesh, once, and received vague answers about Faraday cages and signal interception. Someone had been worried about signal leakage from this section despite the regolith layer covering the corridors, and Burrows had wisely decided to not ask further.
His own workstation was some distance down the corridor in an area simply known as Section Five, where a majority of the engineering workshops unrelated to mining were located. Here, in a hallway reinforced with industrial rubber mats on the floor and the occasional coarse patch from where something had spilled or caught fire, Burrows looked for the door with the robotic baby painted on the outside and keyed himself into the workstation, only to be greeted by the sight of Dixon sleeping at the main terminal. The man was seated in one of the swivel chairs around the terminal station, head resting on his arms, and with a blanket halfway around his shoulders. In front of him, several screens glittered with data metrics and diagnostics from the various feeds that they routinely monitored, and on one of the screens Burrows could see several talking heads from what appeared to be a video conference that was in progress. The lights were dialled almost all the way down, giving only faint strips of yellow from above.
Their workstation space consisted of three hexagonal module sections - each one the same shape and size as the one Burrows lived in - stacked together around a triangular intersection piece. The resultant Y-shaped space was filled with fabricators and a variety of milling and lathing machines down the two rear-most modules, while the frontmost module - which Burrows had just entered - held most of the computer hardware used to run the processes here. It was also in this space that Dixon was slumped, and Burrows went looking for a clean cup of water before gently prodding Dixon’s shoulder to get a reaction.
Dixon eventually stirred, and sat up with bleary eyes. He took stock of his surroundings, and then turned and blinked at Burrows with reddened eyes.
“Am I still dreaming?”
“Unfortunately for me - no,” Burrows replied, and handed him the cup of water. “I thought we talked about you sleeping in here.”
“We did, and I remembered.” Dixon took a sip and rinsed his mouth before spitting into one of the many empty cups on the terminal beside him. He downed the rest of the water in one long gulp. “I was doing the Clarke uploads, and Chi was asking about our work with the sensors. We had a good connection, so I chatted for a bit…”
“...and then you just had to rest your eyes, and now it is morning,” Burrows finished, and shook his head. The overhead lights were busy brightening, the sensors responding to the movement in the workstation. “You can’t keep doing this. You should be getting proper rest, we had a long day yesterday.”
“So I wasn’t dreaming that part,” Dixon mumbled, and looked for a place to put down the latest empty cup. His voicebox did not convey the fatigue that was etched across his face. “I’m sure I slept at some point during all that.”
“You slept on the way back, yes, in the sensor crate. When was the last time you slept before that?”
Dixon tried to rub the sleep from his eyes, failed, and resorted to just pulling his hair back with his hands. Dark stubble was busy turning his cheeks and jawline into a continuation of the black hair that bunched across his head.
“I don’t remember. Yesterday morning I think.”
Burrows just shook his head, and helped the other man to his feet. Despite being of an equal height, Dixon lacked the solidity - and solid skeleton, courtesy of Earth gravity - that Burrows had, making him easy to lift.
Burrows inhaled as he lifted, and then regretted it.
“Dixon, go hit the showers and then go pass out. I’m going to start on the rest of the Mumbai sensors, and you can take over this afternoon.” Burrows nudged Dixon towards the workstation door once he was on his feet, and followed him to the door. “Emphasis on the shower - you smell like the Gambi Ridge.”
“So rude,” Dixon mumbled, before sniffing his one armpit and pulling a face. “So rude and honest.”
The door hissed open, and Dixon left, stumbling occasionally like a man with a hangover. Burrows had not smelled any alcohol on him, which was good. At least one habit had been kicked.
With that sorted, Burrows took some time to go over the screens where Dixon had been working before fatigue claimed him. Several of the feeds were monitoring the various science projects they had commissions for - like the Mumbai sensor masts - and after a long back-and-forth checking between the upload ratios and the latencies, Burrows was pleased to see that everything was well within tolerances. The new mast on Gambi Ridge was busy trickling in atmospheric data too, adding to the ever-growing stream of data that they kicked up to Mars orbit and then across to Earth on a daily basis via the laser links.
A separate terminal screen held the links for the Clarke upload, which Dixon had been so adamant about sorting out. These were less familiar to Burrows, although there was a progress indicator ticking away in the one corner, to show some kind of movement with the uploads. Clarke-Zero and Clarke-One were in Earth orbit, which took a while to reach - especially considering the size of the data packets that they were sending to the artificial intelligence models.
The last screen held the video conference talking heads, and after watching the different faces for a moment Burrows realised that they were some of Dixon’s acquaintances from outside Home One. He rarely spoke of the time he spent in the Euro colony and the Golden Bough Collective, before time and tides had brought him to Home One, but Burrows knew that he still had some contacts in those regions.
Contacts who apparently kept him up all night. Burrows shook his head and keyed the terminal off. The conversation clearly no longer needed Dixon, and Dixon needed sleep more than whatever was being discussed or gossipped about at that point.
From the terminal area to the intersection was filled with more data systems - Dixon’s speciality - and Burrows paused to look up at the intersection skylight above when he passed through. The intersection module was about twice as tall as the regular horizontal sections, poking a tower of reinforced and insulated plastic up through the surrounding regolith to allow the natural daylight of a distant sun to filter down. The light and space overhead helped to fight the debilitating claustrophobia that struck some of the settlers once they realised that they would spend the rest of their lives hiding out to avoid the radiation that bathed Mars on a daily basis.
The two fabricator sections of the workstation were set up in a similar style to the data section - long tables on each side, with cabinets above and below - but where Dixon’s area was filled with terminals and screens, the fabricator sections were filled with everything that they needed to create and assemble the machines and systems which kept the colony running. Pope had once jokingly called it the Machine Womb, and Dixon’s subsequent drawing of a robotic baby on the door had ended up as their logo after that. Settler humour was odd that way.
Several of the machines had been running through the night, eating metal stock and spitting out finished components, and Burrows began his morning inventory of results versus progress. Segmented arms and tool assemblies clicked and whirred around him as the machines tirelessly cycled through their routines, and the air had a smell of ozone and heated metal despite the efforts of the extractor fans.
The first thing on the list was the next sensor mast for the Mumbai contract, which the machines had been crafting in sections over the past few days. Burrows was pleased to see that enough components were ready for him to start assembling, after which Dixon would take over with the soldering harnesses and the electronic integrations.
The other machines were in various states of activity, for a variety of other projects, and Burrows slowly worked through them all, compad in hand to check and tick off confirmations which the machines generated once they finished each batch. One of the small chemical printers had stalled overnight, a nozzle unexpectedly gumming up, and Burrows spent the better part of an hour taking the assembly apart and cleaning components before painstakingly reassembling it.
It was not always exciting work, in the Womb, but it kept their accounts ticking over, and - most importantly - it kept Home One alive. Burrows, Dixon, Reyn - hell, even Pope - they all had agreements with the settlement administration to keep various systems running, and even the most mundane or routine of tasks still left Burrows with the feeling that here, at least, he was making a difference.
The morning hours passed without any interruptions, and it was just after midday when the compad pinged with a notification from Admin. Burrows wiped his hands on one of the nearby rags, and then stabbed a finger at the device to display the message.
There were two: a request to come to Admin to meet the new kid, and a call-out from Alvie Ranch for security escorts. Burrows felt a frown flit across his face before he remembered the announcements from a few weeks before. The food labs needed a new aquaponics specialist, and it looked like they had finally found a candidate.
The Alvie Ranch call-out was something else. It was on the Militia subnet, which meant that only the serving members would have gotten it. The fact that they were requesting escorts for their cargo spoke of a serious concern on their side about interception - which, this deep in their zone, was not supposed to be common. Something must have happened in their area, Burrows thought to himself, something to make them this cautious.
Giving himself a quick wipedown with a slightly cleaner rag, Burrows left the workstation and headed back to the admin dome.
It seemed that it would not be a mundane day after all.
Next chapter: TBC
