She could see him struggling to regain control of himself. He’s let his mask slip, Vijay thought, and now he wants to get it back in place.
At length, Carleton’s smile returned. He pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “I still have some single malt back in my room. Care to have an after-dinner drink with me?”
Vijay automatically glanced at Jamie, sitting with his back to her.
“I’m not sure that—”
Something exploded out in the night. The dome shook, glasses and dishware rattled, Vijay’s tea sloshed in its cup. People jumped to their feet, staring, looking around. Someone knocked his chair over with a crash.
“What the hell was that?”
Suddenly everyone remembered that they were on Mars, millions of kilometers from help, with the thin cold air outside keening like an alien beast.
Exiles, Vijay thought. He’s right. We’ve exiled ourselves.
Tithoniae Fosse: Hammer Blow
Half the people in the cafeteria were on their feet. Everyone was staring, wide-eyed, fearful.
Chang bolted out of his office and looked up at the dome’s structural support beams, lost in shadow.
“Something exploded!”
“I didn’t see a flash.”
“Nothing’s on fire.”
“Are you sure?”
Jamie headed for the monitoring center. Check the life-support consoles first, he told himself. He noted that the dome didn’t seem to be punctured. There was no rush of air, not even the high-pitched whistling of a pinhole leak. My ears haven’t popped, he said to himself. Air pressure’s holding okay.
The monitoring center was the largest cubicle in the dome, packed with consoles that kept constant real-time watch over all the sensors and observation equipment on the ground and in orbit high above. Four people were sitting in the middle of all the screens, earphones clamped to their heads, eyes focused on their displays.
Before Jamie could ask, their chief, standing near the cubicle’s entrance, said, “Got a satellite image of a big flash up on Tithoniae Fosse, ’bout a hundred, hundred-ten klicks from here.”
“Up on the plain?” Jamie asked.
“Right.”
Chang pushed past Jamie. “Life-support systems?” he asked sharply.
“All in the green,” said the chief technician calmly. “No problems.”
Chang gusted out a pent-up breath.
“Might be a meteor strike,” Jamie said. “A fairly big one.”
“Goddamn seismograph gave a big lurch,” the chief technician said, pointing to one of the screens.
“Let me see,” said Chang.
The nearly flat line of the seismograph record spiked sharply, Jamie saw. An impact. The technician monitoring the satellite sensors powered up a blank screen. Standing to Chang’s side, Jamie saw a false-color infrared view of the plain spreading northward from the rim of the valley: Tithoniae Fosse.
Several others were crowding up at the cubicle’s entrance.
“It’s okay,” Jamie said, raising his voice. “Seems to be a meteor strike up on the plain.”
Izzy Rosenberg wormed his way through the gang at the entrance. “A meteor strike? Where? How far? How big?”
Chang pointed to the monitor screen in front of him. “Repeat it,” he said to the technician.
The satellite imagery flared with a sudden burst of light that blanked out the screen. Christ! Jamie thought. If that had hit here, even if it only hit the greenhouse—we’d all be dead.
“It overpowered the camera’s sensitivity,” Rosenberg muttered.
“Must have been a big one,” Jamie repeated.
Sal Hasdrubal’s voice called out, “Let’s go out and see it!” Turning, Jamie saw the tall man looming over the heads and shoulders of the crowd jammed at the entrance to the cubicle.
“It’s night,” someone objected.
“The rock hit up on the plain,” someone else observed.
Undeterred, Hasdrubal said, “We can ride up on the cables; they go to the top.”
“And what do you do then, walk a hundred kilometers?”
“In the dark?”
“There’s two campers in the old dome up there,” Hasdrubal said impatiently. “Power ’em up and let’s go!”
“No,” said Chang. He said it quietly but with the firmness of the Rock of Gibraltar. All the other voices stilled. “We send a rover, not people. Monitor the rover from here.”
“But it would take half a day to program a rover,” Rosenberg objected.
“And somebody’d have to carry it up the cliff to the plain,” Hasdrubal added.
Jamie said, “Dr. Chang, I think sending a small team would be faster and more effective.”
“Mission protocol does not allow excursions at night,” Chang said, scowling. Jamie knew that he was right, almost. Camper missions had gone out for days, even weeks at a time. They weren’t supposed to drive at night, but Jamie remembered Dex and Possum Craig and others who had bent that rule out of shape.
Rosenberg jabbed a finger at the mission director. “Dr. Chang, that strike was big enough to blast out a new crater! It must’ve heated the ground considerably, melted the permafrost! We’ve got to get to it before the area freezes over again!”
Chang remained unmoved. “No excursions at night. Besides, the campers stationed at the old dome cannot run at night. The batteries are flat and need sunlight to recharge.”
“But we could get to the dome tonight,” Jamie heard himself say, “and have the campers ready to run by sunrise.”
Chang glared at Jamie, then seemed to relax. His shoulders slumped slightly. His expression lost a bit of its rigidity.
With the merest of bows, Chang said, “If the scientific director recommends such a procedure, I will ask for volunteers to assist him.”
Jamie realized he’d just been appointed head of the excursion. Fingering the bear fetish in the pocket of his coveralls, he said to himself, All right. That’s the path I’ll have to take.
“Now we’ll see how well the nanosuits protect against the cold,” Jamie said to Vijay, trying to sound unruffled and fearless.
They were back in the cafeteria, pulling together enough food to take care of the three men who had been picked for the excursion: Rosenberg, Hasdrubal and himself.
“I’ll monitor your life-support sensors,” Vijay said as she shoved shrink-wrapped sandwiches into the insulated case Jamie was carrying.
“Good,” he said.
She gripped his arm, forcing him to turn and look at her. “If I tell you to stop and return to base, you stop and return. Understand?”
Nodding, “Sure. Right.”
“I mean it, Jamie. I want you to promise me.”
He was staring into her eyes. Then he broke into a slow, almost shy smile. “I promise, Vijay. I’ll come back to you.”
She made herself smile back at him even though she felt terribly worried about this sudden mission into the hundred-below-zero cold of the Martian night.
As they went to the airlock and the rack of nanosuits stored there, Vijay saw that half the dome’s people were gathered there, milling, buzzing. She glanced at her wristwatch: barely half an hour had passed since the meteor had hit.
Then she saw Carter Carleton off to one side of the crowd, looking more amused than anything else.
Jamie was moving through the crowd, which made way for him like the Red Sea parting for Moses. He saw Hasdrubal already in the extra-large nanosuit that he used, medical sensors attached to its inner lining.
Reaching for one of the medium-sized suits, Jamie asked, “Where’s Rosenberg?”
“Not coming,” said Hasdrubal. “He’s been replaced.”