Chap 11
Sky's beginning to grow light. Last of the fire wavering out. Nothing left of the Hab but a few metal ribs.
Ianto stirs. Stiff from sleeping on the ground. The other two follow. They've lived through the night. Ianto walks off twenty paces. He's unlocked the top and bottom of his suit and dropped the trousers to his knees. "I'm the first man to piss on Mars."
Giggling, the others follow suit on the other side of the Hab. A beat, then "Damn."
"Whoa." Ianto laughs as he agrees.
"You sure get some arc in this low gravity." Owen laughs as Tosh Ewwwws beside him where she is crouching.
The sun's gonna break any minute. Something suddenly occurs to Owen. He yanks up his pants, runs to the remains of the Hab. Looks around desperately. Pulls free a metal rib. Turns to Ianto.
"Run." He shouts throwing the metal at Ianto, "Towards the sun."
Ianto either understands or doesn't bother to ask why. Takes off. Owen yanks free another shard of metal. Pounds it into the sand a dozen feet from the Hab. The sun is just breaking the horizon. Robby is fifty yards away.
"Stop! Left. Left. A little more. Right. Mark it." Owen yells as he adjusts his own peg a tad. Ianto comes loping back.
"What'd we do?" Ianto pants as he comes to a stop.
"Built a directional." Tosh sees it and smiles at Owen. "Now at least we know where something is."
The RADIO CRACKLES. "Good morning, kids. Martian weather today's clear and cold. Warming to a high today of around sixty."
Jack hasn't slept. There's notes and charts and additional HHC's all over the place. "So...Houston has an idea."
They listen to the plan. It doesn't impress them.
"That's it? We walk a hundred kilometres in one day to find a twelve-by-twelve object that's been sitting there for 30 years." Owen snorts with incredulity, "That's the best plan they could come up with?"
"It's the only plan they could come up with." Jack sighs down the line.
"I guess that makes it best." Owen offers with a shrug.
"There's an I.R. maintenance port on the Cosmos. Your H.H.C. should talk to it. You'll have to reprogram the launch sequence. The bad news is..." Jack begins.
"There's bad news?" Owen snarks.
"...is it's programmed in a forty-year-old dead operating system no one uses anymore. It was something called...Windows." Jack finishes, ignoring the snarky Londoner.
None of them have ever heard of it. They all look at each other and shrug.
"We're getting a copy of it from the Smithsonian. We're gonna have to download it to you." Jack sighs as the silence comes back.
"Let's worry about it when we get there. Where're we going?" Tosh asks.
"I've got coordinates for you." Jack smiles. That's my girl.
"How 'bout something simpler. Like how many degrees it is off from the direction the sun rose. We marked it. I'm figurin' we're within half a degree." Owen looks about as though he could see it.
"Heck, we just gotta pack." Ianto says to Tosh with fake horror and she giggles. He picks up a satchel of tools. Everything else's burnt to a cinder.
Several minutes later, basic trig has been calculated. A triangle of scavenged wire stretches with one side along the directional, the other side points their way across the Martian landscape. They take a last sighting, and stride off into the distance getting smaller and smaller and then Ianto looks doubtful. "A hundred kilometres. Sixty-odd miles. Say two and a half marathons. In twelve hours. Do we really have a chance in hell?"
"It took us six hours to go 26 kilometres last time. We don't have the rebreathers, we don't have the tanks." Owen slumps as he agrees.
"Figure you weigh about fifty pounds in this gravity. We have a chance in hell. But not much more'n that." Ianto snarls as he flings a piece of metal into the burnt out fire pit.
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Mission Control.
A messenger is escorted in and taken to Borokovski. He's got a copy of Windows, fifty years old, and still in the shrink wrap. Borokovski rips it open, then peers at tech requirements on the box. "I will need a computer with a CD-ROM drive. And a pentium processor."
Nobody moves. It's like asking for a steam engine.
"What's a pentium processor?" Andy asks.
"What's a CD-ROM?" Gwen gapes.
"It was all state-of-the-art in Kazakhstan. We were cut off." He growls at them, defensive.
Still nobody moves.
"We gotta wake up the Director of Dead Technology at the Smithsonian. And quick." Rhys demands and they all groan.
Assistants scramble. Rhys comes over to peer curiously at the shiny silver disk and he recalls anther comm link interruption.
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*********************FLASHBACK*******************
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They're playing poker and Doc is talking to his son over the comms between hands, the others cat calling and making obscene noises like it's an orgy. He's grown used and fond of these people.
"Call." Doc flicks a poke chip down.
"Call." John flicks his own in.
"Call." Owen huffs, his chip slapped down defiantly.
Owen fans his cards down. Full house. "Kings over queens."
"That's it. You're the best poker player in a hundred million miles." Doc agrees as Owen preens.
"Yep." Owen crows, as he rakes in all the chips. "And no one'll play for money. What a waste."
"I'm done. See you all in the morning." John yawns.
Game over. John leaves, Doc starts to follow as he regains conversation with Rhys, then turns and asks, three-quarters kidding "Do you cheat?"
"Compared to what?" Owen answers cryptically.
Doc gives up and leaves. Heading to his quarters where he will patch the comm link through once he settles on his bed. Rhys is left listening to the two men remaining.
"Do you cheat?" Ianto asks softly.
"Only John" Owen answers.
"That seems fair" Ianto agrees and they laugh softly.
"You know what I miss? A drink sometimes at the end of the day...Damned hard-asses at NASA." Owen sighs.
"You got enough gear on board to splice genes, right? Glassware, tubing, Bunsen burners...all that kind of stuff?" Ianro asks as he slides the cards into their box.
"Yep, sure do. Why?"
Ianto grins.