Mars Fire - Chapter XV - Sol 4
Serialized science fiction
Previous Chapters: Chapter I , II , III , IV , V , VI , VII , VIII , IX , X , XI , XII , XIII , XIV
Chapter XV - Sol 4 - Thursday
It turned out that there had been a sighting of unmarked bandit rovers just east of the railway line connecting Culheimer to Stockton, and the majority of the CDM forces in Southern District had been routed towards that to form a cordon around the suspected area of operations of the bandits. Settlement after settlement gave the same answer as Burrows called them up: whatever forces they had, were off to the west, trying to track down the bandits. No-one was sure exactly how large the bandit force was - figures from five to eleven rovers were floated - but every settlement that he engaged with gave the impression that it was a severe situation, and had been treated as such by the South District command channels. Responding to a single reported incident at Cora Springs was clearly a much lower priority in comparison.
“Maybe it’s those five that tried to ambush us yesterday,” Dixon mused after the sixth call. They were about twenty minutes out of Stockton at this point, and the deceleration phase was going to start soon. “If Command managed to track them down somehow, it would be great for assuring the other settlements that the district routes were being kept safe.”
“I’d honestly be very surprised if it was the same group.” Burrows checked the time, then slid the driver seat backwards to stretch his legs. They had a long drive ahead of them once they got off at Stockton. “They scattered in every direction yesterday, and none of them were marked. We lost idents on half of them within five minutes after they saw our escort formation. How would you possibly now reacquire those same rovers hundreds of kilometres away, in a new area?”
Dixon had no answer to that, and neither did Burrows.
The train’s deceleration phase started a few minutes later, with a slight drag and change of gravity in the rover, and Dixon headed back to the galley to start a fresh pot of tea. Reyn and Pope woke within minutes after that, attuned as they were to the pitch and rumble of the train, and Ian was the last one to stumble into the galley eventually. Everyone looked and felt a bit dishevelled from the unusual sleeping pattern the past two days, except for Reyn, who managed to slick his hair back and appear his usual self within minutes of waking. They were only about five minutes out from the station at this point.
As the youngest of the Bear State cities, Stockton had a rather different architectural profile to the original three DBMC outposts. The truncated concrete pyramids, which defined much of the style of the other cities, were conspicuously absent here, and instead the stacked, hexagonal poly-plastic modular containers - much alike to the Machine Womb space at Home One, as well as Burrows’ own living space - dominated here. The containers were easy to assemble and even easier to transport due to their light weight, and much of the Stockton layout consisted of stacked heaps of these containers, collected in vast honeycomb patterns and rising above the landscape in stubby plateaus. Regolith and rock barriers covered many of them, providing the radiation shielding which the older pyramidal designs natively possessed because of their concrete exteriors, and the entire city, as seen from the approaching train, had the appearance of a field of giant mole mounds. The glitter of solar panels was few and far in between here, and aside from the road grid and the train lines converging on the western side of the city from three directions, Stockton appeared almost like a natural feature of the terrain.
“People had learnt quite a bit in the years between building New Hopetown and this place.” Burrows pointed out a particularly large hillock in the distance to Ian while sipping at his tea. “Most of the city is underground here, and that big hill is the only visible part of their power plant. They dug a thermal borehole down into the magma lakes below, and now get almost as much power as the Acheron station with a fraction of the risk.”
“Aren’t they afraid of a volcanic eruption?” Ian squinted at the distant hill, but there was nothing much to be seen from the outside. “Our people in Nouveau Toulouse tried it once, but apparently it was too dangerous, and they shut it down again. There were tremors at Planckstadt for almost three years afterwards before it all subsided.”
“That’s because Toulouse sits right across Mount Olympus and the Triad volcanoes. You drill anywhere there, you’re going to have trouble, and Olympus will end up sending your colony into orbit free of charge.” Pope was at the drone station, and leaned forward as he spoke. Burrows could smell the cheese on him as he talked over his shoulder. “This area here sits on the extreme western edge of the Hemworth-Xi magma sea, and that stretches all the way east up until halfway into Syrtis Major Planum. That’s also why so much of the Union is concentrated east of us.”
Ian’s uncomprehending look drew a further explanation from Pope as the train entered the final approach to the Stockton station.
“Remember how people originally thought there was no volcanic activity on Mars? The first people who came here and started drilling deep - properly deep, not that surface scratching the original teams performed - found that there was actually a ton of magma here, it’s just buried deep. You have to drill for several kilometres to get it. Then when they brought out the heavy ground-penetrating scanners with the second colonisation wave, they started seeing how things really look underground here.”
“That was also when they discovered that the fermium pearls which we find on the surface here, actually get formed deep underground in those lakes, and have been pushed to the surface over the past who knows how many million years,” Pope continued. “That’s why the surface pearls are all coated in sulphur. They come from deep underground, from those magma lakes - and the Union found a way to drill down and get access to them right there, right inside the magma. That’s why they set up so many colonies on Syrtis, and took over the whole area.”
“Isn’t it easier to just harvest the fermium from the surface?” Ian sounded perplexed.
“Sure, if you can find some. There’s a reason why prospecting up here is pretty much like prospecting for gold in the Old West,” Pope scoffed. “Those old eruptions have been carried around and pushed in all directions for millions of years now, with the sand and wind here on the surface working very hard to bury them once they’re topside. Once they get topside, they also get scoured clean of their sulphur coat, and then the fermium inside decays and becomes useless for the slow-gates. Finding pearls on the surface is more luck than anything else - so why rely on luck if you can just dig down and get straight to the source?”
Ian appeared to mull it over. The intricacies of mining fermium on Mars were not known to many who did not work directly with it, and the great secrecy that most miners and agencies actively promoted around it - in order to help enforce existing monopolies - did not help either. Burrows himself had known only the broadest strokes of the process before he had arrived, and only time with the Home One mining crews - people like Pope - had helped to broaden his understanding of it all.
“It also requires a great deal of capital and machinery to get that deep, and accidents are hell on both men and machines. That’s why the Union is the only group up here that is seriously pursuing it.” As Burrows spoke, he thought back to the CDM reports he had read on the estimated casualty rates from those Union bore-mines, and just shook his head. “We can’t throw people and machinery away at that rate, no-one up here can. For the Union, it’s easy maths though: they put their workers on those big transport rockets that they churn out of Luna, sling them over to Mars, and then dump them into the mines here. Professional miners, as well as others. Dissidents, protestors, criminals, people who refused implants - pretty much anyone who doesn’t fit in with the Union’s official Party dictates. They just burn through people the way we burn algae concentrate in the recycling plant.”
Ian’s eyes became almost comically large as he listened. Burrows had to wonder at what the Confederation of European Nations was teaching its citizens about the realities of the Asian Prosperity Union and its practices. Was that ignorance intentional, or accidental?
“That’s why none of us want to end up in Union camps,” Burrows continued, and levered himself up out of the driver seat. The train was slowly busy coasting down the final stretch into the unloading yards. “The Union does not have citizens. It has assets, and their Party will burn any asset it needs to, to stay in power.”
* * * * *
Releasing the rovers from the railcar was a quicker process than when they had set out five hours before, and the two Home One vehicles rolled out of the yard and into Stockton’s valley-like streets not long after eleven o’clock that morning. Nicholson drove ahead of them, having contacted them again even as they were rolling off the flatbed, and once they were outside the city limits the Cora Springs colonists set a punishing pace along the route they had planned earlier that morning. The prevailing wind had shifted from the south-west to the west, and tried in vain to blow their dust back past them as they kept their course to the south-east. Nicholson’s pace did not allow for it, though, and Burrows spent more than four hours driving with his own dust floating halo-like alongside their rover before the wind shifted back to the south-west and dispelled the tumbling dust around their convoy.
This area of Southern District was a mix of ridges and dune flats, and cresting one of the soft dunes would show one a momentary vista of khaki and orange and caramel rocky outcroppings, before plunging them down into the next trough between the dusty, frozen waves of sand that covered the bones of the land here. Crater rims appeared, tilted past underneath their wheels, and were gone behind them, only for the opposite rim to appear minutes later and repeat the same see-sawing motion. An endless procession of inclines and dips, of ascensions against powdery dust followed by skittering down the lee side of dunes and crater rims, left Ian with a queasy expression not long after Stockton had disappeared over the horizon behind them. Dixon gave him some motion sickness tablets, and shared a grim laugh with Burrows once the younger man had crawled back to his bunk. The route they had plotted out to the Cora Springs mining site went directly cross-country for most of the way, and where other regular roads were usually flattened - and eventually destroyed - by mining haulers, the ground they crossed here was pristine and untamed in every sense.
Burrows eventually put the rover on autopilot, temporarily, some time after the wind direction changed, and allowed Dixon to take over the main controls. They were approaching the infamous Delman Drift basin, and they needed a fresh driver in the seat for that. He shifted himself to the drone station after visiting first the head and then the galley, and had just managed to secure his teacup in the provided holder when Nicholson’s voice came snapping at them over the comms channel.
“Exeter-66, this is Cora-1. I can see the first patches of Delman Drift up ahead. How shall we proceed?”
“Take point and stay the course. Pick up speed if you can. We’ll offset to your flanks to stay out of your tracks. If anyone loses traction or gets stuck, we continue with the vehicles we have. If you get left behind, get on the emergency channel and see who can help with a tow assist.” Burrows looked at the maps as he talked. “We’re only hitting the outskirts here, so keep those fingers crossed that we have a smooth passage.”
Nicholson clicked off the channel without replying, and the rover ahead of them immediately began to accelerate, drawing further away from them. Up ahead, there was a brownish-black stain on the horizon, approaching swiftly.
“Someone is in a hurry to have an accident,” Dixon muttered, half to himself, as he increased the speed on their rover as well, and began to drift their vehicle to the side so that it ended up slightly to the left of the leading vehicle. The soft dust of the drift would often allow one rover to pass, and then suck greedily at the wheels of anything else following in the same tracks. Burrows watched the power output metres on their reactor creeping upward from the rock-solid position it had been sitting at since Stockton. “I hope Reyn and Pope can keep up. They’re a lot heavier than us.”
“Pope made a lot of promises about those new Marshal wheels he put on the rover after the chemhead accident. Let’s see if the hype pays off now.” Burrows trained one of their hull cameras to the right, and spotted the utility rover in a similar flanking position to their own. The thermal view showed a heat plume stretching out behind the vehicle in a long rooster-tail of heated atmosphere. “They’re already running hot. All that extra cargo is not helping either.”
They were in the drift minutes later, and the rover shuddered as it went from the granulated sand dunes to the powdery surface of the drift. Burrows watched the reactor and engine speed indicators diverge in opposite directions, the wheels struggling with the drift’s dust, before stabilising at a new equilibrium after a handful of minutes. Their speed slowly ticked upwards again, and soon they were flying across the drift in a cloud of coffee-black dust that whirled in the sky behind them like malevolent capes.
“What is this place?” Ian had approached from the rear, still looking a bit pale, and braced himself against the interior bulkheads as the rover rumbled over a small hump that sent the entire vehicle swaying for several long moments. “It almost looks like another planet.”
“Super-fine dust, and lots of it. Sit down and strap in.” Burrows pointed at one of the side stations without taking his eyes off the displays. “If we lose speed and stall here, the dust will swallow the wheels until we are flat on our bellies. Nothing gets you out after that.”
“I’m seeing a heat buildup on the number eight wheel.” Dixon’s voice was strained, and when Burrows glanced up he could see a thin line of sweat rolling down the man’s neck below his left ear. His dark hair was clammy around the roots. “Please interrogate.”
“On it.” Burrows flipped to the suspension diagnostics, and immediately saw the heat profile on the rearmost starboard wheel was off. The wheel opposite it, number seven, was also starting to creep into the amber. “I’m seeing the same on the number seven. It might be a load imbalance from our cargo.”
Burrows silently cursed to himself as he pulled up the airflow systems that ran the hydraulic legs of the rover. They had been so preoccupied with their shopping list that morning, that they must have loaded something in the wrong spot in the rover’s cargo bay - and now it was straining the rear of the rover at a time when they least needed it. Unlike the utility rover, which was designed for cargo and had a balancer sensor grid in its bays, the CDM rovers were not built for lugging cargo around. The weight that they carried came from men and weapons, and all of those had very specific, predetermined spaces to go in.
“I’m rerouting air from the scoops down to the number eight and seven wheels. Let’s see if we can cool them down a bit.” Burrows’ fingers flew over the control board, and the hydraulics schematic shifted, showing pale blue lines - representing the external Martian atmosphere - converging on the outlets that played over the wheel hubs in question. The native atmosphere was almost useless for cooling, being as thin as it was, but at high enough speeds and with enough compression - many intakes, only one outlet - they could channel it to assist with cooling certain rover parts.
If the dust and the wind behaved, of course. When they did not, the cooling systems got clogged up faster than you could say micro-particulate dust cake.
More time passed, Dixon occasionally grunting as the rover bounced through a dip or momentarily clawed itself into the air over a slight bump, and the heat on the wheels seemed to stabilise. Burrows convinced the rover systems to treat those cooling points as a priority, and once the system finished automating the tasks, he could finally sit back and divert some attention to Ian.
Ian, surprisingly, looked like he was trying to hide a smile, and Burrows only had to look out the cockpit window, in the same direction that Ian was looking, to understand why.
The CDM rover ahead and to the right of them looked like something from one of the action dramas that were always so popular on the video nets. Dust boiled away from it in spectacular sprays as it raced over the sand, and Nicholson had partially extended their cooling wings at some point, giving the entire vehicle the appearance of a giant insect about to leap up into the air. The mottled militia paint scheme made the rover blend into both the ground and the sky above, and the entire impression was that of purpose, of a focused charge at some distant foe. It only needed a rousing song in the background, Burrows thought to himself.
“It looks pretty cool, yes?” Burrows tilted his head at the cockpit view once Ian looked back. “It’s not every day we get to do something spectacular like this.”
“Spectacularly stupid, you mean,” Dixon ground out through gritted teeth. “This is not a well-thought plan at all. If anything goes wrong now…”
“I know, I know.” Burrows patted Dixon on the shoulder, feeling the rock-hard tension in the man’s posture. “But we signed up for this, and we have a duty to help, and this is the only way to get there faster, so…”
“So I guess we just enjoy it while it lasts?” Ian finished.
Dixon actually took a moment to look away from the view ahead, and gave Ian a deeply suspicious look.
“You’ve clearly been spending far too much time around us already, if that is your take on this!”
Burrows snorted with laughter, and was glad for the harness that kept him in his chair.
“See? I told you he was going to be a fast learner.”
Next chapter: TBC
