Midday on Mars. The sun shone brightly, but a sandstorm was brewing on the horizon, hazing the line where dusty ground met rusty sky. Somewhere over that horizon lurked the biggest mountain anyone had ever seen, rising thirty kilometers into the emaciated sky, but no one would ever believe it was a mountain while standing on it. Its body stretched over an area the size of France, with a grade nearly as steep as a wheelchair ramp.
Amira Saladin was a teenager the first time she made the trip with her parents. They pointed at the ground and told her she was on the peak of the tallest mountain in the solar system. At the time, she didn’t believe a word of it. Fifteen years and more than a dozen return trips later, she still found it difficult to believe. It was a let down, actually.
She eyed the approaching storm with a touch of annoyance. “Just another beautiful day on the Arcadian Plain.”
Kazuo Nagai’s voice came in over her headset. “Cry me a river, Sal. You love it out here. I know it, and you know it. Now stop working your jaw and gimme a hand with this.”
She estimated an hour or more before the storm would hit, time enough to get their work done with ease. She was also pretty sure she outranked Kazuo, so she kept moving at her own leisurely pace. At least, she thought she outranked him. As she watched the coming storm, she wondered if anyone really understood the GAF chain of command.
Sal turned back toward the wall of the Ares Colony, where Kazuo was impatiently holding up a half-tonne composite steel panel. His powered environment suit, called a MASPEC, made him look like the bastard offspring of a man and a forklift, and the forklift had more dominant genes. Sal made a mental note to do something about the suits’ aesthetics once she got all the bugs worked out.
She marched over and grabbed the other end of the panel, and together they carried it to the side, revealing the bare innards of the atmosphere processor beneath. The compartment was full of ducting and jumbled wires. She hated electronic spaghetti. “Remind me to chew out whoever left this mess. It’s like they never heard of cable ties.”
“Probably your father’s work.”
“Shut up.”
Kazuo flicked on his shoulder lamp and hunkered down in front of the compartment. “Which board is it?”
“Jay five. The rack with the bright red error light.”
“I’m color blind, Sal. I’ve told you at least a hundred times.”
“And it’s funny every single time,” she said without malice.
Kazuo selected the screwdriver attachment on his wrist tool, and went to work on the screws which held the circuit board in place. “Tell me something interesting about Mars,” he said while he worked.
Sal pulled the replacement board out of her pack. “Alright. Did you know that in ancient times, Mars was inhabited by a race of intelligent tiger-lizard men?”
“Is that so?”
“Absolute fact. Although their civilization collapsed, a few of them survived into modern times, and around the turn of the century, they assisted human efforts to explore the red planet by wiping off the rovers’ solar panels at night while the machines were powered down.”
“Amazing,” Kazuo said. He handed her the burnt out board, and she gave him the replacement. “Now, what exactly is a tiger-lizard man?”
“They’re basically like normal lizard men, but with jaunty stripes and cheerier attitudes.”
Kazuo gave the replacement board a healthy nudge to make sure it was properly seated, then went about screwing it in. “That makes some crazy sort of sense, I guess. Wait… Last week, didn’t you tell me Mars was originally colonized by little green men with fat heads? There are shenanigans afoot.”
Sal gave the faulty board a quick once over, looking for any obvious signs of failure like a burnt capacitor, but there weren’t any. She’d have to take a closer look in the lab once they got back. “No shenanigans. The little green men, the Quazlpacti as they were called, were the first to colonize Mars, and they brought the tiger-lizards with them as pets. Unfortunately, they didn’t foresee the mutagenic plague which, in a fit of poetic justice, turned them into docile pets and the tiger-lizards into their cruel masters.”
“Fascinating,” Kazuo said. “We’re ready to seal up here.”
Sal packed the faulty circuit board away and then lifted the steel panel up. “It was the Quazlpacti who left the Nazca Lines on Earth, you know.”
“To warn us against the dreaded gas monkeys of Jupiter, right?”
“Nope. Just graffiti. The Quazlpacti were jerks.”
Kazuo stood and turned to give her a hand with the panel, but stopped and put his hands on his hips instead. His posture positively radiated frustration, and Sal was once again amazed at how much subtle body language made it through the bulk of the powered suits.
“You’re holding that panel up by yourself? You weren’t going to experiment on production units anymore, damn it.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t experimenting. It’s just a little performance tweak.”
“Tweak my ass,” Kazuo said. “The suit’s only rated to lift half that weight.”
She walked past him and lowered the panel over the exposed compartment, then punched the pressure seals into place. “I wrote the spec, thanks. No need to quote it to me.”
“That’s not the point. It’s not safe, Sal. What if your ‘tweaks’ fail and five hundred kilos of steel come tumbling down on you? What then?”
“Then my stalwart yet officious partner digs me out and carries me back to the airlock.” She gave Kazuo a nudge in the ribs, which he certainly didn’t feel. “Those are the dangers of frontier engineering, soldier boy. Better get used to it.”
With the panel sealed up, they both marched back toward the eastern airlock at a pace much slower than their suits were capable of. After a long silence, Kazuo said, “You’re really aggravating, you know that?”
“Of course I know it,” Sal replied. “It’s why you like me so dang much.”
Kazuo groaned, and Sal took it as a sign of affection. Kazuo wasn’t the kind to let his positive emotions bubble up to the surface, but it meant they burned twice as bright deep down inside. At least, that’s what Sal told herself while she continued to dig around for them.
By the time they reached the airlock, the sandstorm was still brewing in the distance, and hadn’t made much progress. Sal would’ve been delighted if it never bothered to come together at all. The sound of stones battering the colony’s outer shell always ruined her concentration in the lab.
The airlock doors closed behind them and the chamber began to pressurize, a process made agonizingly slow by obsolete, decrepit airlock hardware. The old tech did its job, though, and just well enough that Sal’s requests for replacements from Earth were ignored. Since they were all mission critical systems, she wasn’t even allowed to experiment on them. Not the slightest little bit.
“Tell me something interesting about Mars,” Kazuo said, looking to kill time.
Sal’s mind was still on those annoying, tiny little rocks. “Did you know that ninety percent of the rocks currently on Mars were brought here by the original colonists?”
“Is that so?” Kazuo asked.
“Absolute fact. The Martian landscape, as originally seen by the Viking probes, was mind numbingly boring, so the colonists brought rocks with them to liven up the scenery. A quarter of the colonists were landscapers by profession, and they spent the first three years carefully arranging them, like some kind of giant Zen garden.”
“Incredible,” he said. “What about the sandstorms?”
“Ruined all of their hard work over and over again, until they finally gave up trying.”
The pressure was half-way there.
“Tell me something interesting about Earth,” she said.
He took a moment to think. Kazuo wasn’t the imaginative type, so he tended to answer with actual, interesting facts. Or things he thought were interesting, but often times weren’t. “Did you know…” he droned out as he tried to think of something, “that when Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, the Great Wall of China was the only man-made structure visible from space.”
“I did know that.”
“Oh.”
“And it’s not true.”
“Damn.”
An uncomfortable silence persisted until the green pressure light came on and the internal doors parted, revealing the mission readiness bay. The oblong room was filled with standard GAF pressure suits hanging on racks, as well as a half-dozen of Sal’s MASPEC powered suits, which faced the wall with their backs open.
Sal and Kazuo marched inside and each stepped up to a mechanical docking clamp, which held MASPECs while their pilots climbed out. A person wasn’t strong enough to remain upright once the suit powered down, and attempts to escape were quite comical when they didn’t result in serious injury.
Sal pulled herself out of the back of her suit and retrieved the faulty circuit board from its hip-pack while Kazuo was still going step-by-step through the power-down procedure. As usual, she found his tenacious grip on procedure endearing in a ridiculous sort of way.
Her comm headset rang. “Yeah?”
“Hey Sal, it’s Rachael. Are you back yet?”
That was Rachael Peretz, a communications operator who—like Sal—had come to Mars as a child with the first wave. Sal had babysat her once upon a time, and they were close friends now. She silently hoped this wasn’t another gab session about the cute sounding boy on the Shackleton Expedition. She didn’t think she’d survive another one of those.
“Just climbed out of my suit. What’s up?”
“Something weird. Can you come to the Comm Center and give me a hand?”
A technical mystery. Sal considered it a minor blessing. “I’ll be there in five. Saladin out.”
She snatched the duty jacket from her locker and took off on an Ares sprint. With gravity only a third of Earth’s, the Martian colonists had learned to run upwards of forty kilometers an hour, and jump several times their own height. It was one of the skills that separated long time colonists like Sal from more recent transplants like Kazuo, who’d dislocated his shoulder several times trying.
Sal flew through one corridor after the next, and then started braking by leaning back and scraping her feet along floor. The motion was rather like skidding down a long hill. She came to a perfect stop in front of the Comm Center door, and it slid open in front of her.
“Hey, what’s going on, Rache?”
Rachael waved her over, and Sal stepped up to her friend’s workstation. The screen showed a graph of a waveform drawn in sharp right angles. It was a digital signal. “Alright. What am I looking at?”
“It all started two days ago. The infra-red receiver blacked out, and at first, we thought it might be solar flare interference, but then it started to happen regularly. Each blackout lasted forty-five minutes, followed by the receiver returning to normal operation for forty-five.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah, I thought so too. Some of us thought it might be a software problem, or a piece of equipment faulting out.”
“But it wasn’t?”
“Nope. Turns out, we’re being hit by an infra-red laser that’s overloading the photodiode. And get this… it’s coming from Earth.”
Earth. No one was talking about it anymore. They hadn’t heard anything from home for more than two months. At first they assumed it was some minor technical problem, or a bout of nasty solar weather. Then, as the silence stretched on, theories of all sorts started to fly, from a nuclear war to some kind of global communications collapse caused by terrorists. Then the conversation just died. There was no way to know what was going on, so they stopped trying to guess.
“Once we tuned down the receiver’s sensitivity, I started analyzing the beam, and I found this signal embedded inside.” She pointed to the screen.
“And you think someone’s trying to talk to us?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I haven’t been able to decode it, though. I was hoping you’d take a look.”
Sal realized her jaw was hanging open. She closed her mouth and stared at the screen for a moment, and tried not to imagine what it could mean. “Yeah. I’ll do that,” she said. “Add me to the comms working group, and I’ll take a crack at it.”
“Thanks,” Rachael said, “and until we know what’s going on, let’s keep this quiet, alright? No need to panic anyone.”
“Sure thing,” Sal said, and she stayed for several long minutes, watching the peaks and troughs of the signal stretch across the screen.