In the Shadow of Deimos, page 21
part #1 of Terraforming Mars Series
“Yeah,” said Luka. Apart from being totally screwed. “I guess so.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Anita knew the asteroid crash was going to happen. She made sure Gianni would be at the research station when it was destroyed.”
“Whoa!” exclaimed Erik, waving his hands as if to bat Luka’s words away. “I don’t want to hear it. I’ve got enough craziness in my life without listening to any more.”
“Craziness? It’s true, I have proof…”
“Oh, mate. I’m sorry to see you like this. I get it with Gianni, he was Italian, hot-bloodied and driven crazy by love. But you… German, dependable, experienced… I never expected you to be affected.”
“You think I am mad?”
“Martian Madness isn’t something to be ashamed of. No one knew what would happen to the human spirit when we left home to live on another planet. It’s understandable.”
“I’m not crazy! Erik, you have to believe me.”
Luka got up to approach his friend, but the security official barked his order again. “Sit down!”
This time, he didn’t obey. Instead, he glared at the man and dared him to do something about it.
“You better do as he says, mate,” said Erik.
“Why?” Luka remained standing. The security official took a threatening step forward. “What more can he do to me?”
“I think it’s better that you don’t find out.”
Luka glared defiantly at the official, then saw Erik’s concerned face and, reluctantly, sat.
The official stepped away but continued to watch intently.
“What happens now?” said Luka.
“That’s not up to me,” said Erik.
“You must have some idea.”
“There’s some talk of getting a doctor to evaluate you. After that… I don’t know.”
“You have to get me out of here.”
“No can do.”
“If not for me, then for the good of the corporation. Anita took money to betray ThorGate. She planted the Martian microbes!”
“She what?” The surprise on Erik’s face morphed into an amused smile. “You think Anita created life on Mars? Now I know you’re crazy.”
“Erik, I’m not, I swear. I have evidence to prove it, I just need to get out of here and get it to someone.”
“My advice, Luka, is to stay here and face the consequences. Tell them you had a mad moment, take the therapy and the medication or whatever they offer you and find a way to get your life back on track. Because there’s nowhere else for you to go. Outside of this room, you’ll still be in Thor Town and Anita owns Thor Town. Even if you manage to take out a rover and escape, there’s a limited number of other places and I doubt any one of them will want to take in someone with your reputation.”
“Erik…”
“Not that you could do that anyway. We’re being hit by a solar flare so the planet’s in lockdown.”
“You have to help me.”
But his pleas went unheard. “I’ll have a word with Anita,” said Erik. “It’s the best that I can do. In the meantime, you should think carefully about cooperating with whatever they want you to do and forget all this conspiracy business. For your own sake.”
Erik gave Luka another kindly, sympathetic smile before he turned away from him and exited the room, what Luka was starting to consider his cell. The security official, keeping his eyes on Luka the entire time, backed away and closed the door so Luka was once again alone.
Luka shuddered as the electronic bleep sounded and the lock secured the door shut with a hollow click which echoed around the tiny room. He felt abandoned. He had one true friend on the whole of Mars and even he was more loyal to his treacherous boss than he was to him. How foolish he had been! He had had a plan for getting himself into trouble, but no plan to get out of it.
He leaned back against the cold, hard wall behind him and closed his eyes against the four walls and the locked door which contained him. In the privacy of his mind, he tried to think of a plan which would get him out of his predicament, but Erik’s words kept coming back to him: “take the therapy and the medication or whatever they offer you… because outside of this room, you’ll still be in Thor Town and Anita owns Thor Town”. There seemed to be little choice. If he clung onto what he knew to be true, then he would never be free to tell anyone. Either way, there would be no justice.
The sound of the door opening again caused Luka to open his eyes and pull his head away from the wall. It was the security official again, this time entering with a tray of food.
“Your friend said you should eat this,” said the official, placing the tray on the end of the bed. It contained a mug of water and a bowl of some sort of brown stew with a spoon resting alongside.
“Erik?” said Luka.
“He wanted me to give you a message that even if you’re not hungry, you should try to keep your strength up and at least have some of the stew. He seems like a good friend. You should listen.”
“Stew!” Luka spat out the word like a piece of moldy bread. “I’m stuck in here and he expects me to eat?”
The official shrugged. “We haven’t really detained someone before. Honestly, I don’t care what you do. I was told to bring this to you. You should be grateful.”
Luka stared at the unappetizing offering as the official withdrew and locked him in again. It felt he was being offered a last meal. But at least it was a distraction from thinking about the hopelessness of his situation. He pulled the tray forward and took a mouthful of water from the mug. It was lukewarm and tasteless, but it moistened his dry mouth. He sniffed at the stew. It didn’t smell of much, probably because it had gone cold and a skin had congealed across the surface. Picking up the spoon, he teased at the liquid at edge of the bowl and lifted out enough to taste. It was tepid and slightly salty with a background hint of a meaty flavor. It might have actually tasted nice if it had still been hot. Maybe if he gave it a stir, it wouldn’t look so unappetizing.
The spoon clonked against something at the bottom of the bowl. He hesitated, wondering if there had been some catering mishap and something unsavory lay underneath the thick, brown gloop.
Carefully, he stirred again. His spoon hit the object a second time. He scooped it up and brought it to the surface.
Sitting on his spoon, with drips of brown sludge falling back into the bowl beneath, was a WristTab.
Luka picked it off the spoon and held it up to examine it closer. He dropped the spoon back into the bowl and pushed the tray away. It was definitely a WristTab. He wiped it on the bedsheets to get rid of as much of the residual stew as he could, pressed the button to turn it on and waited.
WristTabs were supposed to be tough, able to stand up to everyday knocks, and resistant to water, but he had never heard of any experiments to test how one would survive being immersed in a bowl of tepid, fake-meat stew.
The power came on and a wave of elation ran through Luka’s body.
“Thank you, Erik!”
The WristTab was new and completely blank of any personalization. But it had two messages. One was a booking for a rover at the Thor Town depot and the other was entitled “door code.” Curious, he opened it and the WristTab began transmitting. Hoping against hope, he approached the door. Electronic bleeps sounded from outside. Followed by a click and the door was released from its frame.
Gingerly, he pulled open the door and peered outside. The security officials had gone, once more trusting security to the machines. Either he didn’t feel the need to guard a locked door or Erik had used some rouse to lure him elsewhere. Either way, the corridor was empty, and he was free.
Chapter Thirty-One
Luka walked through Thor Town’s main street with his heart thumping loudly and adrenaline buzzing through his body as he resisted the urge to run. He needed to get to the rover depot as fast as possible, but he needed to do so without attracting attention. If he had been on Earth, he could have gone the back way and hidden in the shadows, but in the small, enclosed development on Mars, there was only the front way through the main street. He kept his head down, trying to look like he wasn’t keeping his head down, and walked as quickly as he could towards the rover depot, hoping he didn’t look like someone who had escaped from custody.
He had used the rover depot many times since taking on Gianni’s old job at Thor Town. It was the only one serving the whole complex and lay at the farthest end of the street where its modest entrance was marked by a simple sign above a normal door.
As Luka approached, he saw there was a second sign dangling from a piece of wire looped over the door handle. Laminated and printed in bright red lettering underneath a ThorGate logo, it read: Rover Access Temporarily Suspended Due to Solar Flare Activity. Underneath, someone had stuck a handwritten note which said: no, we don’t know when it’s going to end, so there’s no point asking.
Erik had mentioned something about a solar flare, but Luka had forgotten about it in his eagerness to escape. He paused. Coming to Mars had already exposed him to more radiation than would have been the case if he had stayed on Earth and minimizing unnecessary exposure had been drilled into him and the other migrants during their journey. But he knew he really didn’t have a choice: a little bit of radiation exposure was preferable to being recaptured.
He tried the door and found it to be open.
Inside was a small area, like a waiting room, with a couple of visitor chairs and an admin desk where Luka would usually discuss his rover booking with a member of staff. But, with rover access suspended, no one was there. Luka’s heart calmed: with a bit of luck, he would be able to take out the rover without having to explain himself.
Beside the desk, an airlock door led to the hangar where all the vehicles were kept and serviced until they were dispatched. Above it, a green light indicated the hangar was fully pressurized. Luka placed his hand on the control and, with relief that access hadn’t been restricted, listened to it respond by firing off a loud but brief warning buzzer. The locks uncoupled and the airlock door moved backwards and sideways on automated arms to allow Luka to step through.
On the other side of the airlock door was a large room full of parked rovers, half of them dusty and the other half clean and pristine white. There were, he counted, ten of them, all parked nose to tail in formation. He hurried down the first row, reading the serial numbers off the sides and looking for the one that matched the booking details on his contraband WristTab. But none of them did.
He tried the hatch of the rover at the end in any case but it was locked and the control panel only responded with a stubborn red light when he tried to access it.
He went around the front of the rover to check the next row and almost ran into a woman coming round the other way. He yelped as his adrenaline surged.
The woman, wearing a set of dusty, denim-blue overalls, merely looked up from the full-sized Tab resting on her arm and regarded him with curiosity. She was young, not even twenty, tall and slim bordering on the underweight, with long dark hair which she had pulled back into a ponytail. “What are you doing here?”
Luka put his hand to his chest as if to slow his heart, pretending that she had merely surprised him, not scared the life out of him. “I didn’t think anyone was about.”
“I heard you come in, but I thought it was someone from maintenance. You know all rovers are off limits until the solar flare’s over?”
“Yes, but I’ve got a booking.” Luka lifted up his WristTab to show her.
“I don’t care if you’ve got a signed letter from the Queen of Sheba, we’re in lockdown.”
“But it’s an emergency.”
“Is your grandmother dying in the hospital at Tharsis City?”
Luka took a moment to process the bizarre question. “No.”
“Then it’s not an emergency.” She turned and walked off between the two rows of rovers, heading towards the reception area.
He rushed after her. “Can you please just look at the booking?”
The dispatcher halted, did an abrupt turn, and frowned. “Name?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure about your own name?”
“A friend booked it. He might have used his name, my name, the company name…” Possibly a false name.
Luka showed her the booking on the WristTab. She peered at it and consulted her own Tab.
As he waited, anxiously, with the sound of his own blood pumping in his ears, he evaluated the slender woman in front of him. If it came to it, he could almost certainly overpower her. He could probably knock her unconscious and carry her out of the hangar before he vented the air if he had to. He prayed it wouldn’t come to that.
She raised her eyebrows at the Tab’s screen. “It seems you’re right, you do have a booking. Erik Bergman, is that right?”
“That’s my friend.” He was surprised that Erik was brazen enough to use his own name.
“And, um… you’re right, it has emergency status which clears you to leave during the solar flare.” She lowered the Tab and looked directly at him. There was genuine concern on her face. “Are you sure you want to go out there?”
She nodded towards the large airlock doors which ran floor to ceiling and were the barrier between the rovers and the planet outside.
Luka looked at them too, the warnings from his training still nagging at the back of his mind. “I’ll be wearing a rad-suit, it’ll give me some protection, won’t it?”
“Rad-suits only protect against normal background radiation.”
“But the rover itself has some shielding?”
“Nowhere near as much as you get in a city.”
“If you combine the protection in the rover and suit…”
“You’re still looking at a dose larger than recommended,” she said. “Especially on top of what you’re exposed to every day living here.”
Luka felt the anxiety twist in his stomach. He didn’t have time for a discussion. He had to leave before anyone realized he was gone. “It doesn’t matter, I need to go. Are you going to check out the rover or am I going to have to take this to a higher authority?”
She paused, thinking. He closed his fingers into a fist and tensed his muscles in preparation.
“Your booking gives you authorization,” she said. “I can’t stop you.”
Luka released his fist and allowed his body to relax a little.
“But, if I were you, I would have a serious think about who you consider to be a friend.”
The dispatcher went back the way she had come, towards the front of the row of vehicles and pointed to the rover at the head of the second row. “This is the one he booked out for you. According to this–” she checked her Tab “–it’s all set to go.”
Luka placed his hand on the control and the hatch opened.
“I presume you know that satellite navigation is unreliable during a solar event?”
“Obviously,” said Luka. Although, in truth, he hadn’t even considered it. “I’ll follow the tracks in the dirt.”
“Just don’t get lost. They can be obscured by dust blowing over them sometimes.”
“I won’t. Thanks.”
Luka stepped inside.
“Can I ask,” said the dispatcher, as he turned around to close it. “What’s the big emergency?”
“It’s about getting justice,” said Luka.
She didn’t look impressed. “Well, good luck with that. I’ll go open the airlock.”
Luka watched her walk back down the row of vehicles and closed the airtight hatchway behind him. At the sound of sealing himself inside, he relaxed a little more. In only a few more minutes, he would be out of Thor Town and heading for Tharsis City. He needed to explain what he had discovered to the one person who would understand: Julie Outerbridge.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The computer sounded an alarm the moment the rover left the depot: “Radiation warning: levels of radiation are above recommended limits. Please return to a city or a shielded habitat immediately.”
Its inappropriately cheerful female voice tugged at Luka’s instincts to obey, but he kept going, holding onto his need for freedom and his desire to secure justice for Gianni.
Nudging the rover further away from Thor Town, he brought up the navigation system in the hope he could get enough signal to steer him in the right direction. But the dispatcher in the rover depot had been right: the satellite system was completely unresponsive. The interference from the solar flare meant that Luka couldn’t even get a fix on where the rover was, let alone where it was supposed to be going. But, by using the landmark of Thor Town behind him, eliminating the path he knew would take him to Noctis Labyrinthus and examining the crisscrossing dirt tracks on the ground, he was able to calculate the route he needed to take to reach Tharsis City.
After twenty minutes, the familiar landmarks he knew from his occasional trips out in a rover were gone and he was staring out at a seemingly endless plain of Martian dessert. He kept staring at the horizon, hoping for the structure of Tharsis City to appear in the distance, but it was still just the red of the land meeting the pink of the sky.
“Radiation warning,” chimed the irritatingly cheerful computer again. “Levels of radiation are above recommended limits. Please return to a city or a shielded habitat immediately.”
He didn’t need to be reminded of the danger. He tried to turn it off, but it was part of the rover’s safety systems and couldn’t be deactivated without delving into the code and carrying out some intricate reprogramming. So, he was forced to listen to the computer’s pointless periodic warnings. They were his only companions on the journey because the radiation had also knocked out radio communications.
Staring at the dirt was hypnotic and driving the rover became subconscious as his thoughts turned to what Anita had done. There was a lot to explain to Julie Outerbridge and he wanted to make sure he had it all straight. He was so preoccupied with it all that he didn’t see the tracks in the landscape become fainter and fainter as he drove until they became lost in the dust, like a mirage that evaporates in the desert.
“What were you thinking?”
“Anita knew the asteroid crash was going to happen. She made sure Gianni would be at the research station when it was destroyed.”
“Whoa!” exclaimed Erik, waving his hands as if to bat Luka’s words away. “I don’t want to hear it. I’ve got enough craziness in my life without listening to any more.”
“Craziness? It’s true, I have proof…”
“Oh, mate. I’m sorry to see you like this. I get it with Gianni, he was Italian, hot-bloodied and driven crazy by love. But you… German, dependable, experienced… I never expected you to be affected.”
“You think I am mad?”
“Martian Madness isn’t something to be ashamed of. No one knew what would happen to the human spirit when we left home to live on another planet. It’s understandable.”
“I’m not crazy! Erik, you have to believe me.”
Luka got up to approach his friend, but the security official barked his order again. “Sit down!”
This time, he didn’t obey. Instead, he glared at the man and dared him to do something about it.
“You better do as he says, mate,” said Erik.
“Why?” Luka remained standing. The security official took a threatening step forward. “What more can he do to me?”
“I think it’s better that you don’t find out.”
Luka glared defiantly at the official, then saw Erik’s concerned face and, reluctantly, sat.
The official stepped away but continued to watch intently.
“What happens now?” said Luka.
“That’s not up to me,” said Erik.
“You must have some idea.”
“There’s some talk of getting a doctor to evaluate you. After that… I don’t know.”
“You have to get me out of here.”
“No can do.”
“If not for me, then for the good of the corporation. Anita took money to betray ThorGate. She planted the Martian microbes!”
“She what?” The surprise on Erik’s face morphed into an amused smile. “You think Anita created life on Mars? Now I know you’re crazy.”
“Erik, I’m not, I swear. I have evidence to prove it, I just need to get out of here and get it to someone.”
“My advice, Luka, is to stay here and face the consequences. Tell them you had a mad moment, take the therapy and the medication or whatever they offer you and find a way to get your life back on track. Because there’s nowhere else for you to go. Outside of this room, you’ll still be in Thor Town and Anita owns Thor Town. Even if you manage to take out a rover and escape, there’s a limited number of other places and I doubt any one of them will want to take in someone with your reputation.”
“Erik…”
“Not that you could do that anyway. We’re being hit by a solar flare so the planet’s in lockdown.”
“You have to help me.”
But his pleas went unheard. “I’ll have a word with Anita,” said Erik. “It’s the best that I can do. In the meantime, you should think carefully about cooperating with whatever they want you to do and forget all this conspiracy business. For your own sake.”
Erik gave Luka another kindly, sympathetic smile before he turned away from him and exited the room, what Luka was starting to consider his cell. The security official, keeping his eyes on Luka the entire time, backed away and closed the door so Luka was once again alone.
Luka shuddered as the electronic bleep sounded and the lock secured the door shut with a hollow click which echoed around the tiny room. He felt abandoned. He had one true friend on the whole of Mars and even he was more loyal to his treacherous boss than he was to him. How foolish he had been! He had had a plan for getting himself into trouble, but no plan to get out of it.
He leaned back against the cold, hard wall behind him and closed his eyes against the four walls and the locked door which contained him. In the privacy of his mind, he tried to think of a plan which would get him out of his predicament, but Erik’s words kept coming back to him: “take the therapy and the medication or whatever they offer you… because outside of this room, you’ll still be in Thor Town and Anita owns Thor Town”. There seemed to be little choice. If he clung onto what he knew to be true, then he would never be free to tell anyone. Either way, there would be no justice.
The sound of the door opening again caused Luka to open his eyes and pull his head away from the wall. It was the security official again, this time entering with a tray of food.
“Your friend said you should eat this,” said the official, placing the tray on the end of the bed. It contained a mug of water and a bowl of some sort of brown stew with a spoon resting alongside.
“Erik?” said Luka.
“He wanted me to give you a message that even if you’re not hungry, you should try to keep your strength up and at least have some of the stew. He seems like a good friend. You should listen.”
“Stew!” Luka spat out the word like a piece of moldy bread. “I’m stuck in here and he expects me to eat?”
The official shrugged. “We haven’t really detained someone before. Honestly, I don’t care what you do. I was told to bring this to you. You should be grateful.”
Luka stared at the unappetizing offering as the official withdrew and locked him in again. It felt he was being offered a last meal. But at least it was a distraction from thinking about the hopelessness of his situation. He pulled the tray forward and took a mouthful of water from the mug. It was lukewarm and tasteless, but it moistened his dry mouth. He sniffed at the stew. It didn’t smell of much, probably because it had gone cold and a skin had congealed across the surface. Picking up the spoon, he teased at the liquid at edge of the bowl and lifted out enough to taste. It was tepid and slightly salty with a background hint of a meaty flavor. It might have actually tasted nice if it had still been hot. Maybe if he gave it a stir, it wouldn’t look so unappetizing.
The spoon clonked against something at the bottom of the bowl. He hesitated, wondering if there had been some catering mishap and something unsavory lay underneath the thick, brown gloop.
Carefully, he stirred again. His spoon hit the object a second time. He scooped it up and brought it to the surface.
Sitting on his spoon, with drips of brown sludge falling back into the bowl beneath, was a WristTab.
Luka picked it off the spoon and held it up to examine it closer. He dropped the spoon back into the bowl and pushed the tray away. It was definitely a WristTab. He wiped it on the bedsheets to get rid of as much of the residual stew as he could, pressed the button to turn it on and waited.
WristTabs were supposed to be tough, able to stand up to everyday knocks, and resistant to water, but he had never heard of any experiments to test how one would survive being immersed in a bowl of tepid, fake-meat stew.
The power came on and a wave of elation ran through Luka’s body.
“Thank you, Erik!”
The WristTab was new and completely blank of any personalization. But it had two messages. One was a booking for a rover at the Thor Town depot and the other was entitled “door code.” Curious, he opened it and the WristTab began transmitting. Hoping against hope, he approached the door. Electronic bleeps sounded from outside. Followed by a click and the door was released from its frame.
Gingerly, he pulled open the door and peered outside. The security officials had gone, once more trusting security to the machines. Either he didn’t feel the need to guard a locked door or Erik had used some rouse to lure him elsewhere. Either way, the corridor was empty, and he was free.
Chapter Thirty-One
Luka walked through Thor Town’s main street with his heart thumping loudly and adrenaline buzzing through his body as he resisted the urge to run. He needed to get to the rover depot as fast as possible, but he needed to do so without attracting attention. If he had been on Earth, he could have gone the back way and hidden in the shadows, but in the small, enclosed development on Mars, there was only the front way through the main street. He kept his head down, trying to look like he wasn’t keeping his head down, and walked as quickly as he could towards the rover depot, hoping he didn’t look like someone who had escaped from custody.
He had used the rover depot many times since taking on Gianni’s old job at Thor Town. It was the only one serving the whole complex and lay at the farthest end of the street where its modest entrance was marked by a simple sign above a normal door.
As Luka approached, he saw there was a second sign dangling from a piece of wire looped over the door handle. Laminated and printed in bright red lettering underneath a ThorGate logo, it read: Rover Access Temporarily Suspended Due to Solar Flare Activity. Underneath, someone had stuck a handwritten note which said: no, we don’t know when it’s going to end, so there’s no point asking.
Erik had mentioned something about a solar flare, but Luka had forgotten about it in his eagerness to escape. He paused. Coming to Mars had already exposed him to more radiation than would have been the case if he had stayed on Earth and minimizing unnecessary exposure had been drilled into him and the other migrants during their journey. But he knew he really didn’t have a choice: a little bit of radiation exposure was preferable to being recaptured.
He tried the door and found it to be open.
Inside was a small area, like a waiting room, with a couple of visitor chairs and an admin desk where Luka would usually discuss his rover booking with a member of staff. But, with rover access suspended, no one was there. Luka’s heart calmed: with a bit of luck, he would be able to take out the rover without having to explain himself.
Beside the desk, an airlock door led to the hangar where all the vehicles were kept and serviced until they were dispatched. Above it, a green light indicated the hangar was fully pressurized. Luka placed his hand on the control and, with relief that access hadn’t been restricted, listened to it respond by firing off a loud but brief warning buzzer. The locks uncoupled and the airlock door moved backwards and sideways on automated arms to allow Luka to step through.
On the other side of the airlock door was a large room full of parked rovers, half of them dusty and the other half clean and pristine white. There were, he counted, ten of them, all parked nose to tail in formation. He hurried down the first row, reading the serial numbers off the sides and looking for the one that matched the booking details on his contraband WristTab. But none of them did.
He tried the hatch of the rover at the end in any case but it was locked and the control panel only responded with a stubborn red light when he tried to access it.
He went around the front of the rover to check the next row and almost ran into a woman coming round the other way. He yelped as his adrenaline surged.
The woman, wearing a set of dusty, denim-blue overalls, merely looked up from the full-sized Tab resting on her arm and regarded him with curiosity. She was young, not even twenty, tall and slim bordering on the underweight, with long dark hair which she had pulled back into a ponytail. “What are you doing here?”
Luka put his hand to his chest as if to slow his heart, pretending that she had merely surprised him, not scared the life out of him. “I didn’t think anyone was about.”
“I heard you come in, but I thought it was someone from maintenance. You know all rovers are off limits until the solar flare’s over?”
“Yes, but I’ve got a booking.” Luka lifted up his WristTab to show her.
“I don’t care if you’ve got a signed letter from the Queen of Sheba, we’re in lockdown.”
“But it’s an emergency.”
“Is your grandmother dying in the hospital at Tharsis City?”
Luka took a moment to process the bizarre question. “No.”
“Then it’s not an emergency.” She turned and walked off between the two rows of rovers, heading towards the reception area.
He rushed after her. “Can you please just look at the booking?”
The dispatcher halted, did an abrupt turn, and frowned. “Name?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure about your own name?”
“A friend booked it. He might have used his name, my name, the company name…” Possibly a false name.
Luka showed her the booking on the WristTab. She peered at it and consulted her own Tab.
As he waited, anxiously, with the sound of his own blood pumping in his ears, he evaluated the slender woman in front of him. If it came to it, he could almost certainly overpower her. He could probably knock her unconscious and carry her out of the hangar before he vented the air if he had to. He prayed it wouldn’t come to that.
She raised her eyebrows at the Tab’s screen. “It seems you’re right, you do have a booking. Erik Bergman, is that right?”
“That’s my friend.” He was surprised that Erik was brazen enough to use his own name.
“And, um… you’re right, it has emergency status which clears you to leave during the solar flare.” She lowered the Tab and looked directly at him. There was genuine concern on her face. “Are you sure you want to go out there?”
She nodded towards the large airlock doors which ran floor to ceiling and were the barrier between the rovers and the planet outside.
Luka looked at them too, the warnings from his training still nagging at the back of his mind. “I’ll be wearing a rad-suit, it’ll give me some protection, won’t it?”
“Rad-suits only protect against normal background radiation.”
“But the rover itself has some shielding?”
“Nowhere near as much as you get in a city.”
“If you combine the protection in the rover and suit…”
“You’re still looking at a dose larger than recommended,” she said. “Especially on top of what you’re exposed to every day living here.”
Luka felt the anxiety twist in his stomach. He didn’t have time for a discussion. He had to leave before anyone realized he was gone. “It doesn’t matter, I need to go. Are you going to check out the rover or am I going to have to take this to a higher authority?”
She paused, thinking. He closed his fingers into a fist and tensed his muscles in preparation.
“Your booking gives you authorization,” she said. “I can’t stop you.”
Luka released his fist and allowed his body to relax a little.
“But, if I were you, I would have a serious think about who you consider to be a friend.”
The dispatcher went back the way she had come, towards the front of the row of vehicles and pointed to the rover at the head of the second row. “This is the one he booked out for you. According to this–” she checked her Tab “–it’s all set to go.”
Luka placed his hand on the control and the hatch opened.
“I presume you know that satellite navigation is unreliable during a solar event?”
“Obviously,” said Luka. Although, in truth, he hadn’t even considered it. “I’ll follow the tracks in the dirt.”
“Just don’t get lost. They can be obscured by dust blowing over them sometimes.”
“I won’t. Thanks.”
Luka stepped inside.
“Can I ask,” said the dispatcher, as he turned around to close it. “What’s the big emergency?”
“It’s about getting justice,” said Luka.
She didn’t look impressed. “Well, good luck with that. I’ll go open the airlock.”
Luka watched her walk back down the row of vehicles and closed the airtight hatchway behind him. At the sound of sealing himself inside, he relaxed a little more. In only a few more minutes, he would be out of Thor Town and heading for Tharsis City. He needed to explain what he had discovered to the one person who would understand: Julie Outerbridge.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The computer sounded an alarm the moment the rover left the depot: “Radiation warning: levels of radiation are above recommended limits. Please return to a city or a shielded habitat immediately.”
Its inappropriately cheerful female voice tugged at Luka’s instincts to obey, but he kept going, holding onto his need for freedom and his desire to secure justice for Gianni.
Nudging the rover further away from Thor Town, he brought up the navigation system in the hope he could get enough signal to steer him in the right direction. But the dispatcher in the rover depot had been right: the satellite system was completely unresponsive. The interference from the solar flare meant that Luka couldn’t even get a fix on where the rover was, let alone where it was supposed to be going. But, by using the landmark of Thor Town behind him, eliminating the path he knew would take him to Noctis Labyrinthus and examining the crisscrossing dirt tracks on the ground, he was able to calculate the route he needed to take to reach Tharsis City.
After twenty minutes, the familiar landmarks he knew from his occasional trips out in a rover were gone and he was staring out at a seemingly endless plain of Martian dessert. He kept staring at the horizon, hoping for the structure of Tharsis City to appear in the distance, but it was still just the red of the land meeting the pink of the sky.
“Radiation warning,” chimed the irritatingly cheerful computer again. “Levels of radiation are above recommended limits. Please return to a city or a shielded habitat immediately.”
He didn’t need to be reminded of the danger. He tried to turn it off, but it was part of the rover’s safety systems and couldn’t be deactivated without delving into the code and carrying out some intricate reprogramming. So, he was forced to listen to the computer’s pointless periodic warnings. They were his only companions on the journey because the radiation had also knocked out radio communications.
Staring at the dirt was hypnotic and driving the rover became subconscious as his thoughts turned to what Anita had done. There was a lot to explain to Julie Outerbridge and he wanted to make sure he had it all straight. He was so preoccupied with it all that he didn’t see the tracks in the landscape become fainter and fainter as he drove until they became lost in the dust, like a mirage that evaporates in the desert.
