Slowing down to a crawl, François was moving in short zigzags, trying to cover as much ground as possible.
Suddenly…
“There! There she is! I see her!” screamed François, pointing slightly to their right with one hand, while turning the wheel with the other.
“Liu! LIU!” screamed Dedrick in his suit radio. After checking that François had his helmet on, he jumped out of the rover still moving.
She was walking in a straight line, her back turned to them, apparently unaware of the edge of the cliff ahead. Her slow but steady walk gave her a robotic stance, dragging her feet, as if on auto-pilot. Dedrick reached her within only a few steps of the precipice and grabbed her arm.
“Liu! Stop! LIU!”
Barely fazed by Dedrick’s hold, she turned around and looked at him through her helmet with a dazed look that sent chills down his spine.
“Liu, where are you going? You can’t be out here. It’s not safe.”
But the South-Korean woman was not responding. He could clearly see she was not herself. She did not even seem to “see” him. “Probably the sedative Vera gave her,” thought Dedrick. “Come on, Liu, let’s go home.”
“Home?” she repeated in a weak voice.
“Yes, come on, let’s go home.”
“Home,” she whispered again, so low, Dedrick barely heard her.
Turning around in the thick haze, Dedrick radioed François.
“Ok, I have her. We’re walking back to you. Can you flash the headlights or something, I can’t see a thing?”
“François, did you hear me? François?”
No answer. Dedrick’s grip on Liu Xing’s wrist tightened a bit. Looking frantically around, trying to spot the rover’s dark shape through the impenetrable fog, Dedrick called out again.
“François! FRANÇOIS!?… Fuck!”
Having released his hold on her, Liu began walking away again, in the wrong direction. Dedrick turned around just in time to see the frozen edge of the plateau a few feet away from her. He threw himself forward and forced her to the ground, only centimeters from the sheer drop. The cold ground cracked slightly in a few places around them, and the Russian had just enough time to roll the two of them off the collapsing corniche. A large chunk of rock gave out and fell down the abyss. His heart beating furiously in his chest, he rested there a moment before getting back up on his feet. Pulling Liu Xing to his side, he began walking slowly back against the wind, in the general direction, he was fairly certain that he had come from, looking for the rover.
“I don’t understand, he was right here. What happened?” wondered Dedrick.
A mere hundred meters away, François was driving in circles.
“Crap, where are they? I can’t believe this.”
“Dedrick? Liu? Merde!”
“Fran… ctttcrk…”
“Dedrick? Dedrick, where are you?”
“Crrrckkk… sssssshhhhhh…”
“Damn it! Lost them again.”
Driving blindly through the dense dust cloud, one eye on the occasional beacon light appearing on and off on the dashboard screen, François suddenly heard something hit the side of the rover. He stopped the vehicle immediately.
A hand appeared on the passenger side window.
“Dedrick! Thank God!”
“I know, I thought you’d turned back without us!”
“Don’t be stupid. How could you even think—?”
“Open the hatch!”
Liu Xing was of no help. Dedrick had to lift her carefully into the cabin of the vehicle and remove her helmet for her once the pressure had stabilized.
“So, what happened to you? Where did you go? You had me scare there, for a moment.”
“Yeah, sorry. Right after you stepped out to grab Liu, I almost drove off the edge of the plateau. I had to roll back. I started looking for you, and… But that doesn’t matter now. Listen, we better hurry up. We only have 21% oxygen left.”
After seeing how sad and depressed Liu looked, neither men had the heart to reprimand her for her actions, even if she had put more than her own life in jeopardy. Dedrick tried to say a few comforting words, but none seemed to even reach her. She spoke none to him.
The morning after
The morning sun was slowly making its way along the ridge the Mars First station rested on. There was a good 200 meters or so of plateau between the Martian colony and the edge of the cliff. Close to the precipice, Vera was contemplating the beautiful landscape of the giant canyon in all its rust-orange splendor, a site she could never get tired of. François approached her and sat to her left on a flat rock.
Far in the distance, the immensity of Valle Marineris appeared without end. As far as the eye could see, the great cliffs bordering the giant canyon kept on, fading eventually in a foggy haze beyond the horizon. The magnificent geological feature was several thousand kilometers long. If nature had carved it across the United States, the canyon would have reached from one coast of the country to the other.
“She’s OK, by the way; exhausted but OK. I gave her a stronger dose and we’re not leaving her side this time. She’s not going anywhere,” affirmed Vera. “Ladli has taken the first shift.”
“I hope not. That was a close one. We were lucky to find her in that mess out there.”
“I know. None of us expected that. I should’ve been more attentive to her. Najib’s death was a real blow for her. She loved him, you know? Poor girl… a few days of rest should do her some good though.”
“Look! There.”
He was pointing at an object in the early morning sky. About twenty degrees above the horizon, a spherical body was flying quite rapidly in the far distance. Phobos, the largest of Mars’ two moons, was tracing across the Martian sky, as it did every seven hours or so. Although quite dark and small, the natural satellite could easily be spotted due to its close proximity to its parent planet.
“They say Phobos will eventually crash into Mars in about fifty million years or so.”
“Really? Why is that?”
“It’s due to its orbit. It goes around us faster than Mars’ own rotation speed and that causes the planet to pull it even closer. The process is very slow of course, but Phobos is getting faster and closer every time it goes around us. Eventually, it will get swallowed by the planet.”
“Now that you say it, it sounds familiar. I think I heard about in training,” conveyed Vera.
“Now, the other interesting thing is that the other large moon of Mars, the smaller one of the two, Deimos, goes around Mars much slower. Its orbit is about thirty hours, therefore much wider. Eventually, that one will be sent out into space, away from us.”
“I see…” Vera was looking at him a bit surprised. She wasn’t used to François having a normal conversation, without his usual cracks and rude comments.
“Am I boring you?”
“No, no, on the contrary, I like when you are not constantly goofing around. I’m just not used to it, that’s all,” she offered with a smile.
“Hey! What do you mean, goofing around? When do I-—”
“Guys, can I see everyone in greenhouse II? Thanks,” Dedrick’s voice left their helmet headsets as quickly as it had appeared.
Half an hour later, they had joined Ladli and Tendai in the greenhouse. Dedrick was addressing the small group.
“OK, Mars First headquarters finally got back to us. Apparently, they had to figure this one out. They are going to make an announcement to the media in the morning. That’s in about four hours from now, for us. They asked if we could wait until then to do the ceremony. They’ve also asked that one of us film the whole thing, mentioning their intension to broadcast a worldwide salute to Najib. Anyway, I guess we can wait a few hours.”