Champion of Mars Read Free Page B

vast bulge in the crust that distorted the horizon, its curve blending with the dusty sky.
    “Impressive, isn’t it? As monstrous and beautiful as Aphrodite’s left tit,” said Stulynow. “Even though it is ball-breakingly cold,” he sniffed. “That will be a problem for you, I think. For it me, it is only as cold as home in winter, nothing more.”
    Holland searched the deceptively level mountainside. Black holes gaped where lava tubes and chambers had collapsed into themselves.
    “Where’s the base?”
    Stulynow pointed to a place half a kilometre or so uphill, where a cluster of a dozen bubble tents blistered the mountainside. The largest of the domes was a good forty metres across. A short-range relay array stood in the middle, communicating with the radio mast at the buggy park, and through that, with the rest of the planet. More brick buildings surrounded it. Had Stulynow not pointed the camp out, Holland doubted he would have found it; the domes carried a thick coat of dust, turning the NASA, ESA and Marsform badges into colourless blotches. The parts of the base made of brick were practically invisible.
    “What about my bags?”
    “Open tops.” Three small, six-wheeled drone trucks sat on the hard standing of the rover parking bay by their garage. They came to life, and trundled in single file to the rear of the rover. The cargo hatch folded up, and a conveyor and arm deployed and started to load crates onto the trucks, the Marsform logo on every one. “If there weren’t so many supplies in the rover today, we could ride them up, but we will have to walk.”
    They walked up a track where the rocks had been cleared. Mesh had been laid down to prevent the road rutting, lights and positional beacons delimiting its edges. The android moved effortlessly, Stulynov bounded along efficiently if inelegantly. Holland lumbered hopelessly behind. Every step he took seemed to wrongfoot him, each one seemed to threaten a fall and a smashed faceplate. He had yet to adjust to the gravity, thirty-eight per cent of Earth’s. He felt insubstantial, as if he’d blow away in the wind, and he sweated because of it.
    At the camp, they stopped by one of the larger domes’ porches, a long, flexible tunnel extending out some way from the dome wall. Stulynov produced a stiff brush from a box on the outside. They took it in turns to swipe the worst of the dust off each other and keyed the door open.
    “At least this is not so bad as the dust on the Moon, eh?” said Stulynow.
    “I wouldn’t know,” said Holland.
    “Lunar regolith is much finer, it fouls pretty much everything up within minutes, gives a nasty rash if it touches the skin. I was there for a while at the pole. Martian dust is less of a problem. Here is like returning home from the beach, is annoying, but not too much danger.” He paused. “Although some of the subtypes are very fine, and in others the oxidants react violently with water. That’s more an issue in the lowlands, not up here.”
    They passed into the airlock. A brisk blast of air blew more of the dust away. From a locker in the wall, Stulynow brought out a couple of vacuum cleaners. They used them on each other and passed into a suiting room lined with lockers – Holland noticed one with his name on it, the sticky label clean and adhered fully to the plastic, unlike the others.
    Great, he thought, more evidence of my shiny newbie status.
    They discarded their environment suits, and the android stowed them with rigid efficiency while Stulynow explained how to get all the bulky apparatus into the locker properly. Only then could they proceed into the tent.
    The dome was full of racks of equipment, crates of parts and a small, scrupulously maintained fabricator, a pallet of feedstocks standing by it. One wall was flattened, filled by a large window looking on to what Holland figured was Mission Control. A couple of people in there glanced up at them and waved. Three further concertina tunnels led