Mars Fire - Chapter XI, Sol 3
Previous Chapters: Chapter I , Chapter II , Chapter III , Chapter IV , Chapter V , Chapter VI , Chapter VII , Chapter VIII , Chapter IX , Chapter X
Chapter XI - Sol 3 - Wednesday
The others cycled into the CDM rover while Burrows took a moment to watch the locomotive move up towards the head of the loading platform. Dust billowed around it, hiding it from view once it had passed up the rail line, and he knew it would travel for quite a distance before it was able to switch to the main track and then link with the rest of the train.
Something about Nicholson’s story bothered him. Every settlement that had CDM members had a duty to report incursions and suspicious activities in their area to the CDM authorities. Cora Springs had several militia members, who monitored a sizable swathe of territory around their settlement, and Burrows knew that Nicholson was painstakingly diligent when it came to monitoring and submitting reports from his area of responsibility. Those reports would then get rolled up into local regional levels, and shared back to everyone in the same area that could benefit from the info. What one settlement saw, was shared with everyone. The principle of mutual communication and defence was integral to their operations.
The fact that Nicholson was now talking about events which had not been shared, was a worrying development.
“Reyn, have you found that report?” Burrows, once back inside the rover, racked his helmet and moved towards the drone station seat again. The cabin air was a crisp chill against the sweat that still clung to his scalp from the exertion outside. Dixon was to the rear of the airlock, where the tiny galley and head were, and was heating up something on the stove. Beyond the galley was a bunked sleeping area that could fit six people who did not suffer from claustrophobia, and beyond that was their cargo bay. Burrows spotted Pope in the bunk area, boots off and fiddling with something on his feet.
“I’m busy downloading it now from the Culheimer link. Access is slow as always here.” Reyn was at the map desk where Ian had plotted markers earlier that morning, and had a multitude of screens open around him. His hands were deft over the control boards. Ian sat nearby, watching with rapt focus. “I don’t recall everything from the last report we got, but I’m pretty sure Nicholson’s comments were not in there.”
“He’s not the type to bitch in private and then pretend everything is fine to Command. If he’s telling us about this, I can promise you he’s been telling Command as well.” Burrows sank into his seat, and began to undo his gloves. Most of the rover controls were designed for gloved operations, including the various touch-screen surfaces, but he always preferred having his hands free if the opportunity allowed for it. “The last thing I remember from Cora Springs was a month or two ago,when they had a rockfall that took out a sensor station or something.”
Reyn nodded, eyes never leaving the screens. Something chirped, and new information began to scroll across his desk.
“Here’s a copy of that last report - a week old now, exactly.” He moved the information up onto one of the larger bulkhead screens, and Burrows swung his chair closer to read as well.
It took them a few minutes to work through the part of the report covering their area, and there was nothing. Nicholson’s comments were nowhere to be found.
“There are four main districts that CDM Command looks at,” Burrows explained to Ian, as they read through the sections. “Western, Northern and Southern Districts each focus on New Hopetown, Rhodes and Culheimer respectively, and then there is a Central District that covers everything in the middle. We fall under the Southern District, along with Cora Springs.”
“Except Cora Springs falls under nowhere, according to this.” Reyn frowned, and sat back in his chair. “Nicholson said they’ve had unknowns in their region since at least two weeks ago, so it should be here.”
“So two options then. Either he did not tell Command - or he told them, and there was an explicit decision to omit it.” Burrows leaned back and stroked his chin. “I think the former is out of the question. We know what Nicholson is like.”
“That leaves us with the latter. Which raises a whole list of other questions.”
“Questions we won’t have answers to, either. I think we need to park this until I get a chance to talk to Major Herricks this evening.” Burrows took a deep breath, and was surprised at the scent he found in the cabin air. He sniffed again before turning and looking back at the galley. “Dixon, what are you making?”
“Curry rice, with mince, soya, and greens. Did you all just conveniently forget about dinner?” Dixon rattled foil packages from one implement to the other in the galley, and shook his head as he worked. “Absolute barbarians, the lot of you.”
“We had nutrient bars,” Reyn shrugged when Burrows looked at him. “We didn’t feel like cooking during the midday stop.”
“I don’t think Pope can even cook,” Burrows replied, and there was an indignant shout from the bunk area, followed by a boot that came sailing over Dixon’s head and into the back of Reyn’s chair.
“If you make me spill, you will make me kill,” Dixon sang out, without taking his eyes off the food, while the rest of the men laughed. “Don’t test me, boys.”
“Fine. Let’s eat, and then we can start preparing for the big city.” Burrows got up and moved to the galley, and the others followed.
The locomotive finally hitched onto the carriages just as they began their meal, and the rumble of wheels on rails soon vibrated through the rover in a steady murmur as the train accelerated. With its belly flat on the carriage bed, every creak and vibration passed straight through into the rover, and it took only a handful of minutes before the rhythm settled. The final leg of their journey was under way, and Burrows checked his forearm monitor to mark the time. Five hours from now, they would be pulling into the southern rail station at New Hopetown, and then the shopping spree would begin.
The time passed quickly enough once their early dinner was done. Dixon and Reyn cleared the galley, bickering over some finer elements of the printer designs from the Machine Womb, while Pope excused himself and then ensconced himself in one of the bunks and started snoring within minutes. Burrows took one of the carbines and explained the basic functions to Ian, showing him how the magazine and two-stage trigger worked, and demonstrated the mechanical muzzle plug that would open to allow shots to leave the barrel, before closing again once you let go of the trigger. After six months on Mars, Ian was quick to appreciate why the clunky little anti-dust device was there in the first place.
After that, the four of them settled down around the map desk, and went through the shopping list item by item. The Tier One list was long, and few of the items on it were strange or unknown to them after so many years of surviving out in the wilds. Oxygen catalysers and atmosphere scrubbers dominated, along with a myriad of botany-related components that were needed to keep the colony’s agricultural areas functional. They knew where to find everything, and most of the items could be sourced from a small number of bulk suppliers, which made the collecting easier. There were also a handful of items that Councillor Felmann had requested, for special collection.
The Tier Two list was shorter, and consisted of a great deal of micro-components and tooling parts which they could not yet produce on Mars. Dixon and Reyn ended up agreeing to sort those out together, after they could not agree on who should focus on which suppliers. Burrows nodded along and was secretly happy that he would be able to go talk to CDM Command instead of listening to their constant back-and-forth on the finer details.
The Tier Three and Four lists were even shorter, and got pushed to the bottom of the priority list. Dixon and Pope would look at those once everything else was done, and Burrows already knew that half of the alcohol items would come from a very particular establishment that Dixon always insisted on visiting whenever he was in New Hopetown. His life before Bear State had left him with colourful contacts in colourful places, as he liked to put it. Pope was not present to call him a man-whore, which was his usual response to almost everything Dixon did in New Hopetown.
After that, Dixon and Burrows both retired to their respective bunks, leaving Reyn and Ian chatting softly in the cockpit. Burrows pulled the privacy curtain up around him once he was squeezed into the tiny space, and listened to the dull murmurs of the conversation outside. The conversation and the rumble of the train tracks reminded him of another time and another place, and his thoughts drifted on a long, slow spiral through a past life before sleep eventually claimed him.
* * * * *
He woke again just outside New Hopetown, when the train started its gradual deceleration phase. Something about the change in speed, and the slight shift in gravity, pulled him out of his dreamscape, and it took him a moment to place his surroundings. His dreams had been vivid, yet fled now that he tried to consciously remember them. A jungle, faces, a sensation of heat - it faded into tatters even as he sifted through them.
Rolling out of the bunk, Burrows found the others up and about already, clustered around the cockpit section. Reyn was the first to hear him, and turned around to point at the galley between them.
“Welcome back. We just made tea, if you want.” Reyn had a cup in his hand, and steam curled from it in the crisp cabin air. Burrows took a deep breath of air, and smelled the notes of Ceylon floating in the recycled air.
“How long to arrival?” Burrows scrubbed his hands over his face, massaging some feeling back into it, and felt the whisper of stubble under his fingers. “The braking woke me now.”
“About fifteen minutes, give or take. We’re just passing through the outer districts now.” The cockpit showed darkness outside, night sky over a blue-black desert landscape, and Pope was pointing out landmarks to Ian as they passed.
Burrows poured himself a small cup of tea in the galley, then padded over to join the others. Several of the hull cameras were live, showing the landscape around them as they sped past.
“Did anything happen while we slept?” The tea was hot on his lips and lukewarm in his mouth, a side-effect from years of drinking scalding coffee on Earth. The metal rim of the cup kept searing his lips whenever he brought it up for a sip.
“No, nothing. It’s been pretty quiet.” Reyn used his own empty cup to indicate the head of the train. “There was a storm warning from the engine about an hour ago, but it never showed up.”
The fifteen minutes passed quickly, the scattering of lights outside becoming more prominent as they drew closer to the capital, and Pope listed some of the main points as they swooped by. Dayfield, the shuttle landing field that mirrored the derelict Mannerfield in Culheimer. The botany domes and hothouses that fed most of the capital, with their green and pink signboards. Acheron Crossing, where, in the depths of an excavated crater, the massive nuclear reactors lurked that powered a significant share of the capital. There was a constant haze of rising dust above the Acheron crater, even in the dark, as the molten salt cooling systems dumped their heat into the thin Martian atmosphere.
The southern station, when they finally pulled into it, was right at the edge of the built-up areas, and the familiar shapes of geodesic domes and truncated concrete pyramids - now outlined in gleaming lights and navigation hazard beacons - welcomed them ahead. There was a short tone from the train’s comm channel, and then the all-clear sounded.
They had officially arrived in New Hopetown.
Everyone grabbed their gloves and helmets again - and their boots, in Pope’s case - and cycled out to begin the task of releasing the rovers from the flatbed. The darkness outside was thick, even with the scattered lights along the train’s perimeter and the glow of the habitats nearby, and Burrows motioned for Ian to turn his helmet lights on once they were both outside.
“Don’t take chances in the dark, here,” he cautioned. “The light can be different at night, and you can lose your bearings really quickly.”
“It feels a bit like being under water,” Ian remarked, and did a slow turn to watch his lights disappear into the darkness. “The light just… stops, after a point.”
“It plays tricks with you, yes. People lose their nerves and then make really dumb mistakes.” Burrows bent and began reversing the ratchet clamp on one of the straps. “It helps us when we do militia work at night, but it’s a really dangerous thing to play with.”
“Because somehow, when it is dark, people get clumsy - even on flat terrain,” Pope interjected from the other side of the CDM rover. A loose strap end came sailing over the top of the rover towards them. “Falling and smashing your helmet and knees open is a great way to die in the dark. Especially when the cold sets in.”
Burrows instinctively checked his wrist display, and saw that it was already in the negative sixties outside.
“Speaking of cold, let’s hustle this up and get off the train. We have a lot of work ahead tonight.” Burrows finished with his strap and tossed it to the front of the wheel, where it was hooked to the flatbed. Reyn took over and started working on the next wheel. “I don’t want to spend too much time outside tonight if we can help it.”
The untying process went a bit faster than at Culheimer, and they soon had both rovers ready to move out again. A rail-mounted disembarkation ramp connected with the front of the rover flatbed as they were mounting up again, and soon the machines in front of them powered up and one by one rolled off the flatbed and into the rail yard. Reyn and Pope, once again in the utility rover, led the way this time, and Burrows followed them out of the yard and into the streets of New Hopetown.
It had been the first settlement in the planned DBMC setup, and wide avenues, laid out in a multi-kilometre grid, dominated the layout of the city. At its centre was the Cecil John Rhodes transit facility, colloquially known as just the CJR, or the gate complex. Deep in its belly, protected by layers of fail-safes, the primary slow-gate of the Bear State sat, disgorging - and swallowing - tons of cargo every day. The original DBMC expansion plans had been built around the gate complex as its heart, and the CJR building represented that with its heavy concrete architecture, wide access ramps, and multiple layers of redundancies built to protect it from accidents. Without it, travel to and from the eventual Bear State would have been restricted to predominantly surface modes, now that even the old shuttle fields had been mothballed.
As fate would have it, the realities of Mars meant that most intra-city travel here actually happened below the surface these days, where concrete tunnels could seal in atmosphere and keep radiation out, and so the wide avenues were sparsely travelled at the best of times. The heavier mining haulers were forbidden from entering the city proper, for fear of collapsing those same tunnels, and only visitors and people from the surrounding outlying settlements tended to use the streets for rover and buggy traffic. Given the lateness of the evening, even that traffic had mostly dried up, and the Home One team saw few other vehicles as they rolled east towards one of the agriculture warehouse districts.
Their first target was simply known as Green Shelves, where everything related to food production could be found. It filled one of the newer poly-plastic warehouses on the south-eastern side of the city, and it did not take long before they were rolling into the cavernous loading bay on the one side of the warehouse. Bright lights spilled from gantries and cranes that loomed overhead, and there were only two other rovers there, their cargo bays open and accepting loads from the overseers. Figures in green suits moved around on the bay floor, and someone with a light wand signalled both of their rovers into a loading queue. Reyn, in the lead rover, began the comm check with the warehouse supplier, while Burrows and Dixon began the preparations to receive cargo into the CDM rover. They had to cycle out first, and were soon clustered around the back of the rover, opening the hatches from the outside. The cargo bay was unpressurised, and did not connect to the vehicle’s interior at all.
“We’re going to make things difficult for them now,” Burrows explained as he showed Ian how to open some of the cargo hatches. “Whatever we order, we usually split three portions into the utility rover, and one portion into this machine. That way, if something goes wrong and we lose one of the machines…”
“...then at least we don’t lose the full consignment,” Dixon finished from the other side of the bay. “Are we paranoid that way? Yes - yes we are.”
“It makes sense, I guess. I heard some families travel the same way when they fly here from Earth.” Ian popped open the last hatch that Burrows had indicated, then hauled himself out of the bay and gently floated back to the ground below. “They take two different flights, so that if something happens to one of the flights, then at least the other people are still okay.”
“Which would you prefer: dying with your entire family, or getting here and finding out that half your family died on the way?” Dixon raised an eyebrow, and Ian had no reply to that. Burrows thought of Pope, and his family in Seven Craters, and wondered what he would have chosen.
The items from their shopping list started to appear, arriving via crane and conveyor belt as Reyn haggled with the warehouse keepers, and Burrows kept only half an ear on that conversation while working to shift the crates and vacuum-sealed packages into the rover’s bay. Reyn and Pope together were a formidable team when it came to hammering out deals, and Burrows had a deep admiration for the patience that Reyn brought to the table. His own tolerance for haggling with shopkeepers and bean-counters was significantly less.
It was approaching midnight when they finally finished up at Green Shelves. They were the last rovers in the loading bay at that point, and when they finally rolled out again, laden down with several tons of supplies, one of the two warehouse doors rolled shut behind them.
“That’s their way of telling customers that they are on a slower cycle now.” Burrows was at the drone station, and used one of the rearward cameras to show Ian the warehouse shutters as they rumbled down. “They stay open throughout the night, for emergencies, but from now to about five tomorrow morning, things take a bit longer to sort out.”
“Do all the suppliers here stay open all night?” Ian looked surprised at the news.
“Most of them do, yes. Emergencies don’t really care about time of day or whether you are sleeping or not.” Burrows shut the camera off once they left the warehouse yard. “So for the wildcatters, and the provincials like us, it really helps. Otherwise we’d have to spend a lot of time here just waiting for shops to open. Not everyone has the luxury of time.”
From Green Shelves they headed north, towards one of the engineering hubs, and they were just passing the outskirts of the central district when Burrows tapped Dixon on the shoulder to pull over. The utility rover ahead rumbled on, its tail lights dwindling away in the darkness as their own vehicle coasted to a halt.
“I need to go talk to CDM Command, and you’re coming with me,” Burrows said by way of explanation, and motioned Ian towards the airlock. “It’s faster from here, and they don’t need us for the next section.”
“Slackers,” Dixon pouted from the driving seat. “You always go to visit the pretty boys in uniform without me.”
“Maybe if you start behaving around the boys in uniform, I’ll take you along again someday,” Burrows retorted, and chuckled when Dixon just huffed in reply. “We’ll ping you guys once we are done, then we can plan where to meet up again.”
He grabbed his carbine before following Ian out, taking the ladder down the hull two rungs at a time, and dropped the last distance to the ground. The rover moved on and rumbled down the avenue once they were clear of its wheels, leaving them at the side of one of the concrete pyramids that dominated this older, central part of the city. It had been painted green and blue at some point, although years of storms had left it streaked with raw concrete patches in a distinctive mottled pattern. A nearby signboard proclaimed some engineering service down one street, and what appeared to be a drinking hall down another, if the neon colours and garish designs were to be believed. More of the same structures marched down the avenue on both sides, fading away into the surrounding darkness despite the scattering of outside lights that dotted most of them.
There was no-one else around them, and Burrows slung the carbine over his shoulder and onto his back before motioning for Ian to follow him.
“Come. It’s time for you to meet the important people out here.”
Next chapter: TBC
