Waters of Mars : Target Collection (9781473533455), page 2
Whoever this Doctor was, she wasn’t being lulled by his bedside manner. Her fingers tightened around the grip of the pulse pistol. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Can you find me someone who wouldn’t?’
She tried to read him. Some sign in his eyes or his body language to give her a clue what to think about this stranger who had walked into their lives from nowhere on a dead planet.
‘Why should I trust you?’ she asked him, not dropping the gun’s aim by a millimetre.
‘Because I give you my word,’ he said, fixing Adelaide with his brown eyes. They sparkled with energy and curiosity and joy in so much of what they saw. She didn’t think she had ever seen eyes quite like that ever before. But at the same time, she could see sorrow and pain in them. He had seen wonderful things, and terrible things, too. They were all that, and they were old eyes, too.
‘Forty million miles from home, my word is all you’ve got,’ he said.
Adelaide lowered the gun and clipped it to her belt. She wanted it close at hand if it turned out she was wrong about him. All the same, she wasn’t taking chances: ‘Roman, have Gadget keep him covered.’
Roman confirmed and the robot immediately moved closer in on the Doctor.
Gadget-Gadget!
The Doctor winced. ‘I know I keep saying this – but does he have to keep saying that?’
‘I think it’s funny,’ Roman defended flatly.
‘I hate funny robots.’
Gadget-Gadget!
‘There, did anyone laugh? No. Now, whoever put that sign up outside – No Trespassing, on a lifeless planet – that’s funny.’
Yuri smiled broadly and raised one hand. ‘That was me. Thank you.’
‘Never mind the sign or the robot, Doctor,’ Adelaide cut in. ‘What are you doing here?’
The Doctor studied her and shrugged. ‘To be honest, I was looking for a bit of peace and quiet. A bit of me-time. You know how it is.’
‘A straight answer, please.’
His shoulders dipped from side to side as he seemed to think that through for a moment. ‘Well, nothing in space is really straight, now, is it? It’s all curved trajectories, elliptical orbits, arcuate horizons—’
Ed sprang in a burst of volatile energy from where he had been resting and placed himself beside Adelaide. ‘Mate, just tell us what you’re doing on Mars and who put you here! You’re with one of the independent operations, right? The Branson Inheritance lot? They’ve been talking about a Mars shot for years.’
The Doctor pulled his hands out of his pockets for the first time and spread them wide, like an irritated surrender. ‘All right, you’ve got me! I’m an independent! Very much an independent! Believe me, it doesn’t get much more independent than me. I’ve already told you, I’m the Doctor. Who are you?’
He was asking them all, not just the big Australian, and they all looked back at him with as much disbelief as when they first saw him.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Adelaide. ‘We’re the first off-world planetary colonists in history. Everyone on Earth knows who we are.’
She watched the stranger take a half-stumbling step backwards. He looked surprised, the way someone might when they had taken a punch they hadn’t seen coming. Then, she thought, no, it wasn’t surprise it was shock.
‘You’re the first? The very first humans living on Mars?’
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Of course, we are.’
He looked around him, like he was seeing them all – Ed, Mia, Yuri, Tarak, Roman and herself – for the first time, those brown eyes wide with disturbed awe, ‘Then this is …’
‘Bowie Base One.’ Adelaide said it together with him. She spoke the words as a casual confirmation.
The Doctor had spoken them with horror.
CHAPTER 3
Life on Mars
Andy Stone could remember his first harvest. He had told Maggie all about it, more than once.
He said he had been eight years old, and it was a tomato, small but perfectly round and deeply red, that he had plucked from a spindly but leafy tomato plant grown in a pot at the back of his father’s greenhouse. One side of the greenhouse was filled with tall, flourishing plants, their limbs already bowing with the weight of ripening tomatoes. The opposite side was a jungle of cucumber plants, aubergines and potted bushes of red and green chillies.
Andy’s dad, he had said, had been nursing plants from seeds into bountiful colourful harvests in that big glasshouse in their back garden for as long as he could remember. Not just for the dinner table that Andy shared with his parents and two older brothers, but for neighbours from the surrounding streets. It was an annually anticipated local event when Harold Stone pitched a sign on their front lawn advertising his homegrown produce for sale. He was good at growing stuff, just as his dad had been before him, and the neighbourhood had a taste for his tomatoes, especially.
Harold and his father before him were old-fashioned gardeners who believed in the horticultural benefits of honest-to-goodness fertilisers like that from their household compost heap, made up of almost any kind of organic waste a three-bedroomed house in Coventry could generate. And bags of ripe horse manure from a stable outside the city that Harold carried home in the back of his Ford estate car that would retain the scented memory of the journey for months after.
So, while his father’s crops filled the terraces to either side of the greenhouse, Andy’s first tomato plant had grown in a pot at the far end: the first horticultural adventure that would germinate a lifetime’s interest that would take him around the world and, eventually, off it, to Mars.
Two decades after that first tomato, when Andy had gone home to tell his dad – by then, a widower and almost eighty, but still growing tomatoes and cucumbers for his neighbours – that he was about to become a professor of horticulture, Harold had dismissed the idea that there could be such a thing and, at the same time, seemed to swell with pride that, if indeed there were, his boy was going to be one. And, Andy said that his brothers had told him, when he watched on television the launch of the mission that would take his son all those millions of miles to Mars, Harold had cried tears of pride. Though, by then Harold had known that the doctor’s diagnosis that he had kept from Andy would mean he wouldn’t live to see him return. Harold had managed just one more season, one more bumper crop for his neighbours.
His brothers had got on the video call together to tell him the news of their dad’s passing. The vast distance of space between them, he discovered, shrank to nothing under the weight of grief. And yet, at the same time, he was on another planet, further from his family than any human being had ever been, and every cell in his body had screamed and burned to be with his brothers as Harold’s remains were laid next to those of his mother.
That had been a year ago now. Maggie knew he still thought about his dad a lot as they continued their work together to turn the inert Martian regolith into a fertile soil capable of sustaining life – plant and, thereby, human. The biodome project was in many ways at the heart of Bowie Base One: if humans were to successfully colonise Mars, they couldn’t rely on drone supply flights from Earth. The New Martians, as they sometimes called themselves, would have to grow their own food.
Maggie Cain had been working with him for two years before the Mars launch, locked away in a laboratory in Iceland running experiments on soil samples brought back by the robot probes that preceded and prepared for the Bowie mission. They had seen so little of other people over those two years that life as part of the Bowie Base crew seemed almost crowded. But, in reality, the two of them still spent most of their time away from the others, working together in the biodome.
This was their world and, after almost a year and a half on Mars, you could say it was a world within a world: a green oasis in a red desert that, according to best estimates, had last seen vegetation more than a million years ago.
Together, Andy and Maggie had brought Mars back to life.
‘And we didn’t use one bag of horse muck,’ Andy was saying as the two of them worked amid the foliage growing in the regenerated Martian soil.
Maggie glanced at him from the instrument in her hand. ‘What did you say?’
Andy was standing on the other side of a row of low fig bushes. They hadn’t borne fruit yet, but they were great oxygenators. He smiled at her and shook his head. ‘Nothing. I was just thinking. Ignore me.’
‘Always do,’ she joked, going back to the electronic figures on the bio-gauge in her hand, but she knew what he was talking about: they were both proud of what they had achieved here.
She liked Andy. Good thing, really, after the countless weeks they had spent together bent over microscopes and up to their elbows in foul-smelling organic compounds, both in Iceland and here on Mars; otherwise she would have whipped up some kind of toxic goulash from the components of her chem-kit and seen him off a long time ago. He was a big puppy-dog of a man, she’d always thought, and not just because he spent so much of his time digging in dirt. He was shaggy-haired with boundless energy and curiosity; all he really needed was a waggly tail and his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Over their time working together they had come to tell each other pretty much everything. She had been an only child, but Andy was the kind of brother she’d always wanted.
She unclipped the instrument’s electrodes from the leaves of the apple tree she was monitoring, and looked round for Andy, but he had disappeared into the greenery around her. Most of the flora they had planted here had been delivered by the supply drones once their work to make the Martian soil viable was complete. They were mature plants and trees kept in stasis during the seven-month journey. The second phase of the biodome project was to monitor the vegetation’s photosynthesis, to see how long before the biodome could establish and maintain its own breathable atmosphere. Mature plants would give that process a kick-start, whereas growing from seeds would take forever.
Currently they were all breathing oxygen processed from the H2O glacier buried deep under the surface from which Bowie also drew its water.
Water was the essential element in the alchemy of life anywhere in the universe and its discovery here below the Gusev Crater had been the strategic reason for building the base. Millions of years before, the canyons and mountains of Mars had been submerged beneath seas; now, all that remained of those oceans was trapped as ice beneath the surface; only a fraction of the volume of water that had once covered Mars and made it so similar to its sister world, Earth, but still billions of tons of it. Enough to sustain a Bowie Base crew for generations. But the long-term plan for Mars was more ambitious than colonist bases like Bowie. One day astrobiologists like Maggie hoped the Martian surface could be green with vegetation, with a once-again breathable atmosphere.
That work, she knew, would take generations to complete. But it would all have started here with the work they had done side by side in the first biodome. Andrew Stone and Margaret Cain; their names would go down in history.
‘Andy?’ she called out, moving off from the apple trees.
There were winding footpaths through the plots of trees and bushes, and she followed the one she guessed Andy had most likely taken. The one that led to his pet project that he called Harold’s Garden.
‘Andy?’
Something twisted in the pit of her stomach.
They both loved the biodome with its warm dampness and the smell of greenery and growth. Andy called it their New Eden, and she had always thought he was right. It was their Garden of Eden; they had created it. It was beautiful and so peaceful. Like a cathedral of flora. But now something felt very wrong about it.
And then she saw him. He was standing in the middle of Harold’s Garden with a huge grin on his face. One hand was raised above his head. In it, like it was a prize for achieving World Peace, he held a long bright orange carrot, the fresh Martian dirt still clinging to it.
‘Life on Mars,’ he proclaimed, his eyes alight with triumph. ‘And it’s a carrot!’
Maggie felt that brief anxiety fall away, and her own mouth stretch into a smile: ‘Your first harvest!’
Harold’s Garden was a large vegetable plot. Unlike the trees and other plants in the biodome, everything here had been grown from seed, and in the meticulously hoed rows of reddish Martian soil there were now long perfectly straight rows of cabbages, leeks, potatoes, kale, peas, beans and other veg. They would help make Bowie Base self-sufficient. She knew Andy had been itching to dig up the first of his first Martian crop, but at the same time he had been putting it off, giving the produce all the time it needed to be perfect.
‘Hold it right there,’ she said, inspired by the moment, and pulled out the camera she used to photograph her biodome specimens. She snapped Andy and his Martian harvest. ‘That carrot is going to be famous.’
‘The first veg ever to be pulled out of the soil on Mars,’ he marvelled and breathed in its scent, a mixture of sharp, sweet carotene and the musk of damp Martian soil. ‘I’m gonna eat the sucker!’
With another big smile he bounded toward the nearby standpipe to wash the carrot clean.
Big puppy!
Maggie shook her head, delighting in Andy’s enthusiasm. The First Martian Carrot was a big deal, but she still had her specimen readings to complete. Captain Adelaide didn’t check her biodata log every day the way she did with other Bowie departments, but you could bet that the day Maggie was late with her daily readings was the day the base commander would look for them. And Maggie didn’t care to be at the business end of one of Adelaide’s blistering reprimands.
She clipped the electrodes to one of Andy’s cabbages and heard water gush somewhere behind her as he washed off his carrot at the standpipe.
The water would still be icy cold as he rinsed the carrot off. Not surprising after it had been frozen for so many million years, she supposed.
She heard the water stop as he turned off the tap. She looked round as he straightened up. Beads of water clung to the fibrous orange skin.
‘Here it is. The big moment,’ she smiled.
He bit into it.
He began to chew, then her monitor beeped, its readings complete, and she turned back to unclip the electrodes.
‘So, what’s on the menu for tonight, do you reckon?’ she asked, crouched down with the vegetables. ‘Carrot soup? Carrot cake? Carrot curry?’
Andy didn’t answer.
Maggie got up and turned, asking, ‘Carrot soufflé? Carrot lasagne?’
Andy was on his knees in the Martian dirt with his back to her. His shoulders were jerking violently. His head snapped backward and forwards, then slumped onto his chest.
He was a merciless joker. Had been ever since their days in isolation in Iceland.
‘Stop mucking about,’ she told him.
And he stopped. Suddenly. Like some power supply to his body had been turned off. His head remained bent forward, and he was absolutely still. She could hear the sound of trickling water. But the standpipe beside him was turned off. Then she saw the carrot on the ground.
That thing in her stomach shifted again.
Fear.
This didn’t feel like he was mucking about. ‘Andy. Are you OK?’
His head snapped round towards her.
Maggie’s scream shattered the cathedral peace of the biodome.
CHAPTER 4
November 21st
Adelaide didn’t like the way the Doctor was looking at her and her crew; like a real doctor surveying a ward full of patients with bad news to break.
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked. ‘On Mars?’
Adelaide shook her head and looked around the rest of her team in the control room, as if one of them might have any idea where this man had been while they’d been making history. ‘Seventeen months,’ she said, starting to lose her patience with this strange charade.
The Doctor didn’t seem to notice, he was talking to himself. ‘Seventeen months? Bowie Base One was established July 1st in 2058. So, this is 2059.’ His eyes widened. ‘It’s 2059! Right now!’
Ed looked across at Steffi who still held the odd-looking orange spacesuit, ‘I’d give that a check over if I were you. I reckon there’s a glitch in his oxygen feed. That or he’s had a bang on the head out there.’ He looked back at the Doctor, ‘Of course it’s 2059!’
The Doctor suddenly slapped his hands to his temples. ‘Oh, my head is so stupid! You’re Adelaide Brooke! Captain Adelaide!’ He spun round to look at Ed. ‘And you’re Ed Gold, Deputy Commander.’
Adelaide frowned as he looked around, naming them all: ‘Tarak Ital, MD; Nurse Yuri Kerenski; Senior Technician Steffi Ehrlich; Junior Technician Roman Groom; Geologist Mia Bennett.’ His eyes rested on Mia for a moment. ‘You’re only twenty-seven.’
There was sadness in his gaze that clearly made her uncomfortable. ‘What? What are you talking about?’ Mia demanded.
But Adelaide’s patience was in the red now. ‘There wasn’t a news feed on the planet that didn’t carry our biographies before we launched, Doctor. Everyone knows our names.’
‘They’ll never forget them,’ he answered quietly.
Yuri was grinning. ‘I can handle being remembered for ever. Imagine my statue. Yuri Kerenski, Hero of Mars!’
The Doctor broke in. ‘Today! What is it? The exact date!’
‘November 21st,’ Adelaide said.
‘No,’ the Doctor breathed. ‘This is the day.’
Adelaide stared at him, ‘What day?’
The Doctor wasn’t listening. The TARDIS had played tricks on him before, but they had never been quite so brutal.
Today, of all days.
The day they all die.
His mind went back to another day. He had seen the newspaper coverage with different eyes in a different body. It had been a cloudy day in Manhattan, and he’d just bought a hot dog smeared in ketchup and laced with yellow mustard from a place on 8th Avenue. He had found a discarded but neatly folded copy of the New York Times on a bench. As he had unfolded the paper, the leaden sky over the city let go the first few drops of rain, they hit the newsprint heavily, like small wet meteors. It seemed in tune with the story:
