Champion of Mars Read Free Page A

awake. Holland blinked his eyes and looked around him in confusion. The rover had stopped. The silence was disconcerting. The cabin rocked gently, buffeted by the spring winds.
    “You were sleeping,” said Stulynow.
    “I was dreaming,” said Holland. He grasped his suit gauntlet and twisted it off so he could rub his eyes. “Of the ocean.”
    Stulynow smiled. “We all do that; or of the forest. It’s this place. Dr Miyazaki says it’s the planet, reaching out to us to tell us to make it live again.”
    “What do you say?”
    “Bullshit,” said Stulynow with a broad grin. “It’s seeing red and brown all the time, makes you want to look at some other colour. Come on, we’re here. Suit up.” He pulled Holland’s helmet from an overhead bin and handed it to him. “It’s a short walk over to the main entrance. The ground’s too unstable to take the weight of the rover, and the drones will be busy.”
    “Do I get to see the tube today?”
    “You are one eager son of a bitch! No. Well...” – the Russian scratched his head – “the entrance, maybe. Tomorrow. Ask Maguire when we get in; he wrote your itinerary.” He turned to the android, flipped down a panel, and depressed a large button designed to accommodate gloved fingers. “You too. Wake up, lady, we are needing you now. Beauty sleep is over.”
    The machine’s face quivered as it came online, a rapid succession of expressions flickering over the softgel.
    “See?” said Stulynow. “She dreams too.”
    “I do not dream,” said the machine. “I was assisting Dr Vance in the medical laboratory. She is annoyed at the interruption.”
    “Then tell her she can carry your sheath back up to the base herself, if you’re too precious to spare for five minutes so you can walk.”
    “I will walk.” The android stood. She gave Holland a long look.
    “Watch out for him, he’s a Frankenphobe,” Stulynow said to the machine. The android appraised Holland a moment longer and stalked off down the long passenger cabin, feet clicking like those of a beetle expanded to nightmare proportions. The machine took up station beside the door.
    “I am sorry for being rude before. It is the Russian in me,” said Stulynow. “We are an emotional people, always up and down. Riding the rover makes me down. At least today, it was only we three. You should try it with twenty dirty construction grunts; then you will know discomfort.”
    “I think I preferred you dour.”
    “Wait a while, and you will get your wish.”
    “Are you ready, Dr Stulynow?” asked the android.
    Stulynow helped Holland put his helmet on and checked the seals on the gorget, then donned his own and gave a thumbs up. Fans roared to life, sucking the air from the cabin; the rover lacked a discrete airlock. The fans ceased, the air pressure brought close to Martian norms, less than one per cent of that at sea level on Earth. That was at Mars’ mean planetary elevation, and they were much higher here. The android reached out a slender carbon plastic finger and touched a wall panel, which flashed from red to amber to green. The door popped out and slid away along the exterior of the vehicle. A faint outrush of air carried a cloud of flash-frozen water vapour with it.
    They stepped out onto a hard standing. A thirty-metre comms mast towered over one corner, by a couple of equipment bunkers built of sintered soil bricks, uplinking them to the Red Planet’s nascent ring of commsats.
    Outside, it was bitterly cold, so cold Holland wished he had a full vacuum suit on rather than the lighter Martian environmental gear. They were only halfway up the northern flank of Ascraeus Mons, nine kilometres above the mean. Up here the temperature hovered around minus forty degrees celsius, even as the plains below warmed to near freezing in the spring sunlight. The sky was caramel with dust blown up on spring winds, visibility was middling. The shallow slopes of the volcano marched relentlessly upwards, making a