“Replaced? What do you mean?”
“Outranked by our senior geologist,” said Hasdrubal, pointing.
Turning, Jamie saw Monsignor DiNardo pulling a nanosuit over his black coveralls.
“You’re going out?” Jamie exclaimed, surprised.
DiNardo said, “This is what I came for.”
“But…”
“You think I am too old for such an adventure?” DiNardo grinned at Jamie. “I am not so much older than you, Jamie.”
Hasdrubal let out a grunt. “The geezer squad.”
DiNardo waggled a finger at him. “I prefer to think that I will give our little excursion a closer link with God.”
Jamie tried to smile. But he thought, Coyote will be waiting for us out there in the dark. Coyote the trickster, the destroyer. We’ll need DiNardo’s God. We’ll need all the help we can get.
Night
Vijay wanted to kiss Jamie before he left, but there were too many people crowded around the airlock and once Jamie pulled up the hood of his nanosuit and inflated it into a bubble helmet it was impossible anyway.
So she watched him and the priest and Hasdrubal trudge to the airlock hatch. Jamie waved to her before stepping through. She waved back, feeling suddenly alone and afraid.
The hatch closed. The telltale lights on its control panel cycled from green, through amber and to red.
They’re outside now, she thought. They’re walking to the cable lifts.
The crowd broke up. Dr. Chang walked briskly toward the monitoring center, hands at his sides, shoulders bunched forward.
“You look like a lady who could use a drink.”
Carter Carleton was standing beside her, looking bemused. “I still have that single malt in my quarters,” he said.
“No,” Vijay said firmly. “I have work to do.” She started toward the infirmary, where the medical monitors were.
“They’ll be perfectly fine,” Carleton said, walking beside her. “Those suits are good to nearly two hundred below.”
“Are they?”
“They test them with liquid nitrogen, I’m told.”
Vijay shuddered at the thought of stepping into a vat of liquid nitrogen, suit or no suit.
Carleton reached for her arm, but Vijay kept striding determinedly.
“Look,” he coaxed, “they won’t even get to the cable for another ten minutes. You have time for a quick drink. Just one.”
“Not tonight, Carter,” Vijay answered, thinking, Not ever. Not with a man who tries to move in when my husband’s out risking his butt.
“When they come back then,” Carleton said easily. “We’ll have a celebratory drink together then.”
Without another word, Vijay left him standing in the middle of the open dome as she headed for the infirmary. He doesn’t give up easily, she said to herself. You’ve got to give him that.
Jamie knew it was only his imagination, but he felt cold in the nanosuit. Just a couple of molecules separate me from unbreathable air that’s close to a hundred below zero, he kept thinking. Just a couple of molecules.
They walked along the well-trodden ground, three little pools of light from the lamps built into the shoulders of their suits bobbing in the enormous empty black night of Mars. Overhead hung the stars, silent and solemn, spread across the sky so thickly Jamie could barely make out the familiar shape of Orion. The Milky Way flowed leisurely across the heavens, and one bright blue star beckoned to him: Earth, the blue world.
Jamie couldn’t reach into his coverall pocket to feel the bear fetish, but he knew it was there. Guide me, Grandfather, he prayed silently. Help me get through this.
“There’s the cables.” Hasdrubal’s voice in Jamie’s earphone sounded tense. He could hear DiNardo puffing, but the priest said nothing.
“We’ve reached the lift,” Jamie reported on the radio frequency that linked to the excursion controller. He pictured in his mind the group clustered around the controller’s console: Chang, Rosenberg… would Vijay be there or in the infirmary?
As if in answer, Vijay’s voice came through. “All your medical readouts are fine. No worries.”
Jamie still shivered involuntarily as he helped DiNardo clip the climbing harness across his barrel chest, then checked Hasdrubal’s harness.
“Hey, who checks you?” Hasdrubal asked.
Coyote, Jamie almost said aloud. Instead he answered, “I’ve been doing this since you were in diapers, friend.”
The three of them rode up on the cables side by side in almost complete silence. Jamie had expected Hasdrubal to make some chatter, but the lanky biologist kept his thoughts to himself. He thought he heard DiNardo mumbling something, praying perhaps. They were facing the cliff, which whisked by in a blur of strange, almost menacing shadows in the weak light of their shoulder lamps while their booted feet dangled in empty air.
It took almost fifteen minutes to reach the top of the cliff. Thanking the nanosuits for their flexibility, Jamie swung over and planted his boots on the solid rimrock. Hasdrubal did the same, then the two of them helped DiNardo get himself set on the ground and out of his harness.
Jamie held up his left arm to peer at the greenish glow of the GPS readout among the instruments on the pad he wore on his wrist.
“The dome’s this way,” he said, starting off toward the horizon.
“We have you on the positioning system,” came the voice of the excursion controller. “You’re exactly five hundred and seventy-two meters from the dome.”
The original dome from the First Expedition had been sited more than a hundred kilometers to the northwest, on the other side of the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands. When it became obvious that the main base for the explorers should be down on the floor of the rift valley, Jamie had approved the geologists’ insistence that they keep a pair of campers up on the plain for excursions to the Tharsis Bulge highlands and their massive shield volcanoes.
Now we’re going to examine an impact, Jamie said to himself as the rounded hump of the dome rose like a sharp-edged black shadow against the starry sky. That’s something different from the blue world, Jamie thought as they walked toward the dome: there’s hardly any haze on Mars, especially at night, when the temperature’s so cold. No foliage or buildings, either. You can see the stars right down to the horizon.
The dome was powered by a small nuclear reactor, buried half a kilometer away. It had provided electrical power for nearly twenty years; Jamie remembered that it would need refueling in another five years or so.
The dome’s airlock was big enough for all three of them to squeeze in together. Its dim red lighting still seemed bright to Jamie after spending nearly an hour out in the night.
Once they stepped through the airlock’s inner hatch, though, the dome lit up brilliantly. Jamie blinked and suppressed an urge to laugh out loud.
“Well, the lights work,” said Hasdrubal. He stepped quickly to the monitoring console that sat next to the airlock.
“The heat, too,” DiNardo said. “Gratia Dei.”
Jamie realized he wasn’t the only one who had felt cold out in the night.
Hasdrubal scanned the console screens. “According to the readouts, the air’s okay. Kind of chilly in here, though, not quite up to twenty degrees Celsius.”
Jamie grinned. “That’s better than outside.”
“Amen,” said Monsignor DiNardo.
The three of them pulled down the hoods of their suits as they looked around the dome. It was a spare facility: one row of cubicles for sleeping quarters, a compact galley that hadn’t been used in months, consoles that monitored the life-support systems, a communications console, and across the open floor sat the two campers.