Back, essentially, to normal! Old OS now available again, including my email, so I'm able to resume writing, and better yet, reading!
58
Endurance-
They were up and doing before daybreak, roused by the last man on watch that night, John Tracy. Early morning Mars glow made everything around them as yellow-brown as a coffee stain, and weirdly unearth-like. But that was outside; inside, the onboard systems whirred, clicked, cut off and shifted duties; as busy, in their fashion, as the newly wakened crew.
As always, there were checklists. Interweaving, timed and concurrent, they frequently required one crewmember to cross paths with another, at the precise momentwhen a third hand or second set of eyes would be most useful. It was almost balletic, in a fast-forward, over-turned ant pile sort of way. As the light rose outdoors, and mission elapsed time clicked relentlessly over, work aboard ship grew more intense and focused.
The vessel itself had to be prepped, and placed on standby, hard-suits inspected and donned, then the tractor powered up. Pete McCord further commanded ('management decision', as he called it) that the two massive power suits be unloaded.
"No idea what's out there," he told the crew, as they gathered for a brief meeting, "but I'll be damned if we're going to stroll up to it, fat, dumb and happy. Ladies, full power, widest scans possible, and all weapons ready. You're gonna be the heavy hitters out there, today, and I'll need you on high alert. Get the picture?"
Linda nodded briskly, rummaging through the galley for leftover anything.
"Frame, canvas and pigment," the doctor quipped, forcing a light tone. She wasn't turning much up in the way of breakfast. "Although… two days ago, I'd have said that the worst thing we might run into would be some really peeved microbes."
Cho located the last box of chemically stabilized milk, which they might have shared 'round, had the boys not conveniently turned up lactose-intolerant… or not hungry… or too keyed up to eat, leaving the milk to Linda and Cho.
Physician first, and person second, Dr. Bennett started to order a general mouthful apiece. Kim Cho stopped her in mid-snap, though, placing a gentle hand on her arm.
"Let them," the Korean whispered softly, as Pete, Roger and John went off about their scheduled business. "It is all they can do for us."
Bennett's lips pursed, as she regarded the boxed milk, and the retreating males.
"We're not helpless, Cho," she replied tautly, raising her voice a bit, as a hidden cooling fan started up, "we don't need looking after, just because we're women!"
She rattled with every gesture, loud as a shower of pebbles in the dense plastic and metal of her Martian hard-suit.
"Perhaps not," Cho responded serenely, opening the milk box, and dividing its contents into two waiting cups. (Her black hair was pony-tailed back, and she looked like the schoolgirl heroine of a Japanese cartoon in all that gleaming black and yellow armor).
"…but they still feel the need to try. Blame testosterone," And Cho smiled slightly, the bit of lip gloss she'd smeared on that morning catching and returning the overhead lights, "…drink the milk, and let them be men."
Second-best advice she'd gotten all day. Linda and Cho downed the milk, then scraped together a meal for the guys; weak coffee, with a last slice of bread toasted and split three ways. If nothing else, it was warming, and much appreciated.
Endurance had a big, darkcargo bay, where the power suits and tractor were kept (also the unused habitation module, biological samples and drilling equipment). A garage, basically. The air smelled of lube oil and spray-sealed packing foam, and it was cold enough within for their breath to mist up, triggering the hard-suits' heating units. Wasteful to leave off their helmets, so Cho gave Roger a quick, shy kiss, letting him stroke a bit of dark hair off her forehead before locking in.
Pete and John were deep in conversation. Something serious, and mostly one-sided, as McCord did the talking to occasional, silent nods from his blond pilot. Linda would have liked to say something, but stifled herself on the grounds that it wouldn't have sounded professional. She wasn't about to let anxiety and loneliness push her into a doomed relationship. Junior- high school stuff, and she was too smart… too mature… for such nonsense.
So, she gave the two men a nod in passing, locked down her helmet and crossed over the slatted metal deck to her power suit, footfalls reverberating through the air until she sounded like a tour group at a cathedral. She'd be even louder, soon.
The big, cybernetic loading machine stood cocooned in its gantry, powered down and silent. In her off time, Linda had slipped down to the service bay and buffed off the suit's corporate logos, leaving only the NASA and mission emblems, and the American flag. Raytheon and Tracy Aerospace might be paying the bills, but they hadn't purchased her.
She climbed up into the proudly cleansed machine, took a seat in the open cockpit, strapped in and hooked up. The thing at once came to life, transferring sensory data from the power suit to her own skin and nerves. In essence, she'd now feel and act through the machine's systems, rather than merely piloting it.
As she looked around at readouts and power levels, scanning ship and crewmates in fourteen different frequencies, a voice came over her helmet comm.
"Hey." John, laconic and quiet as ever. He'd chosen a private channel.
"Hey, yourself, Sunshine," she replied, still trying to balance professionalism with growing affection. Damn. So much for 'too mature'…!
He inquired (from anyone else, it would have been nothing more than a hollow pleasantry; for John, however, a genuine attempt at conversation),
"How's it going, doctor? Interface giving you any trouble?" He'd repaired the laser damage done to her suit's knee, all those months ago, and was still concerned about sensory feedback.
"Awful," she joked as the gantry pulled away, allowing her to flex the repaired limb, "I've got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left-hand side."
"Sounds like a wetware problem," John told her, feigning seriousness, "but I'll see what I can do."
Someone keyed open the external access hatch, which thendropped outward with a loud, grinding clank, forming a ramp to the ground outside. The service bay filled at once with bitter wind, swirling sand and a glimmer like moldy orange marmalade. Show time.
That this was it, that life or death decisions would soon be made based on what lay in the distant supply cylinders, escaped no one, and was likewise remarked upon by no one. They'd cross that frayed rope bridge when they got to it. In the meantime, there was work to be done.
The tractor was a low-slung, multi-tread affair with a closed cab. It hummed to life at the press of a switch, then caterpillared down-ramp, driven by Roger Thorpe. Pete rode shotgun, John further back, strapped into a bulkhead seat. Not very comfortable, but he had too much on his mind, at the time, to really care. For just the briefest, weird instant, the universe had seemed to… skip, like a scratched disk, or poorly spliced film. As if reality had taken another hair-pin turn just a shade too fast, and lost its grip on the road, again.
"Eddies in the time stream," he murmured to no one in particular (carrying on with Bennett's joke), "…sure wish he'd get the hell out."
No one else seemed to have noticed, so John pushed the matter aside to focus on immediacies. Roger kept his eyes on the lightly frosted, orange and grey 'road' as though he anticipated flashing lights and a siren.
The Marine navigated only partly from memorized simulations. Besides landscape cues (he was headed, broadly speaking, for the terrain between the two nearest craters, and away from the Tharsis plateau), Thorpe used the cylinders' locator beacons to choose his course. Coordinates beamed down from Mars Global Surveyor, and Pete's quiet travelogue provided all the guidance necessary. A good thing, too, as the view was often obscured by flying sand, or sudden dips in the terrain. Not that they were moving all that swiftly, not on triangular treads; just that the wind had picked up, and the lighter stuff seemed to spend a great deal of time in the air.
From inside, the tractor was quite noisy, with a rough, jolting ride reminiscent of the Mole. Suspension needed work, John noted, with a tiny part of his occupied mind.
(Something very large and unwieldy was pushing through his thoughts, trying to fit itself together…)
Staring through round, thick-paned windows, he could see the power suits pacing along to either side of the snarling tractor, kicking up fountains of red dust with each long, loping stride.
The big machines were remarkably fluid, their operators' movements converted in real time, with nearly human grace, like some kind of world's fair animatronics. Massive and strong, they were, but surprisingly fragile, for Linda and Cho were actually less protected up there than the men in the tractor. More exposed to radiation and flying sand, for instance.
Suddenly apprehensive, John rubbed at the back of his left suit gauntlet with the right, as though Five could be summoned like a genie. He felt terribly, dangerously blind, just then.
"Steganography," he announced moments later, half to himself.
Pete stopped muttering directions for a bit, and turned in the copilot's seat. Inside his helmet, the mission commander's head looked like a little figure in a snow globe. John had the sudden, irreverent urge to shake him.
"Sorry…?" McCord prodded. "What-o-graphy?" He'd learned to take John's offbeat pronouncements seriously. Nine times out of ten, they led somewhere important, though by very devious routes.
"Steganography." The pilot repeated quietly. "Hidden writing. Um… digitally speaking, it's when you code something inside another message… music or movies, say… and let it assemble itself once the Trojan message has gotten through the victim's firewall. Should have recognized it, as much as I code overflows and backdoors…"
Pete glanced over at Thorpe, then back at John, again. The Marine was similarly clueless, responding with a baffled shrug.
"Tracy," Pete said, "relate this to what we're doing here and now, for me, please. Maybe it makes all kinds of sense to you, but some of us are a little slower."
John tried to tap at his own forehead, ended up rapping a plastic clad finger against the new faceplate.
"Some of that alien information," he informed the frowning commander, "seems to be compiling."
"Meaning…?" Pete's sandy eyebrows were about to crochet themselves together.
"Still working on it, Pete. When I've used the technique, it's been to code a trademark, or, sometimes, a rogue command. But this? Hell if I know…"
"Something going on, Pete?" Linda transmitted from without. Their speed had dropped, as Thorpe became distracted.
"Roger that, Doctor. Will explain ASAP. Stick to your schedule in the meantime, please."
"Understood, commander." She sounded miffed.
Speaking to John, again, McCord said,
"Give me a risk assessment, Tracy. What're the odds that it is a rogue command, and that you're likely to do something dangerous?"
"I don't know, Pete…" John responded, almost conversationally. "It's hard to tell, from the inside. Uncomfortably likely, I'd say."
"Shit." The commander considered a moment. "When this is all over, I'm retiring, moving back to Saginaw. Nothing ever happens in Michigan…" Then, "Last time, I jumped the gun and nearly got you killed, Tracy. Turned out to be a four-alarm false positive."
For God's sake, as a tiny child, John Tracy had sat on his lap, reading aloud from Armstrong's memoirs! Pete had gotten drunk enough, once, to hold mistletoe over Lucy's head and kiss her, earning a swift kick in the shin from her outraged blond son… There was no way in hell he could be objective!
"Keep me posted," the mission commander said at last, heavily. "And, if you get the urge to do anything, even go to the damn bathroom, talk to someone, first. That's a standing order, Tracy. Supersedes everything else, get it?"
"Got it, Pete."
"Skipper…?" Roger broke in, quietly. "Don't mean to interrupt, but we're within a click and a half of the first supply depot, and the wind's starting to kick up, out there. Global Surveyor's tracking a bitch of a dust storm, headed our way. The window's closing, fast."
"Right. Let's get moving, then."
Pete reached over and clapped a hand to John's nearer arm, generating a hollow, metallic sound; the scrape and clang of armor, rather than comfort. Sudden inspiration made him add,
"I want you to think about how you'd deal with this in a computer, Tracy. Come up with some defensive strategies and get back to me, once we've loaded up the groceries. There's gotta be some way to erase a hidden message…"
Through the forward window, the men could just make out a line of rusty red brown, boiling its way over the horizon.
"…before it's too late."