Getting into a walker, however, was a workout in itself. Nadia wriggled the pants over her long underwear, then the jacket, and zipped the two sections of the suit together. After that she jammed into big thermal boots, and locked their toprings to the suit’s ankle rings; pulled on gloves, and locked the wristrings; put on a fairly standard hard helmet, and locked it to the suit’s neck ring; then shouldered into an airtank backpack, and linked its air tubes to her helmet. She breathed hard a few times, tasting the cool oxygen-nitrogen in her face. The walker’s wristpad indicated that all the seals were good; and she followed John and Samantha into the lock. They closed the inner door; the air was sucked back into containers; John unlocked the outer door. The three of them stepped outside.
It was a thrill every morning to step out onto that rocky plain, with the early morning sun casting long black shadows to the west, and the various small knolls and hollows revealed clearly. There was usually a wind from the south, and loose fines moved in a sinuous flow over the ground, so that the rocks sometimes seemed to creep. Even the strongest of these winds could scarcely be felt against an outstretched hand, but they hadn’t yet experienced one of the storm winds; at five hundred kilometers per hour they were pretty sure to feel something. At twenty, nearly nothing.
Nadia and Samantha walked over to one of the little rovers they had uncrated, and climbed in. Nadia drove the rover across the plain to a tractor they had found the day before, about a kilometer to the west. The morning cold cut through her walker in a diamond pattern, as the result of the X weave of the heating filaments in the suit material. A strange sensation, but she had been colder in Siberia many a time, and she had no complaints.
They came to the big lander and got out. Nadia picked up a drill with a Phillips screwdriver bit, and started dismantling the crate on top of the vehicle. The tractor inside the lander’s crate was a Mercedes-Benz. She poked the drill into the head of a screw, pulled the trigger and watched the screw spin out. She moved to the next, grinning. Innumerable times in her youth she had gone out in cold like this, with numb white chopped-up hands, and fought titanic battles to unscrew frozen or stripped screws… but here it was Ziiip, another one out. And really with the walker it was warmer than it had been in Siberia, and freer than in space, the walker no more restrictive than a thin stiff wetsuit. Red rocks were scattered all around in their uncanny regularity; voices chattered on the common band: “Hey, I found those solar panels!” “You think that’s something, I just found the goddamn nuclear reactor.” Yes, it was a great morning on Mars.
The stacked crate walls made a ramp to drive the tractor off the lander; they didn’t look strong enough, but that was the gravity again. Nadia had turned on the tractor’s heating system as soon as she could reach it, and now she climbed into the cab and tapped a command into its autopilot, feeling that it would be best to let the thing descend the ramp on its own, with her and Samantha watching from the side, just in case the ramp was more brittle in the cold than expected, or otherwise unreliable. She still found it almost impossible to think in terms of martian gee, to trust the designs that took it into account. The ramp just looked too flimsy!
But the tractor rolled down without incident, and stopped on the ground: eight meters long, royal blue, with wire mesh wheels taller than they were. They had to climb a short ladder into the cab. The crane prosthesis was already attached to the mount on the front end, and that made it easy to load the tractor with the winch, the sandbagger, the boxes of spare parts, and finally the crate walls. When they were done, the tractor looked as overloaded and topheavy as a steam calliope; but the gee made it only a matter of balance. The tractor itself was a real pig, with four thousand horsepower, a wide wheelbase, and wheels big as tracks. The hydrazine motor had pick-up even worse than diesel, but it was like the ultimate first gear, completely inexorable. They took off and rolled slowly toward the trailer park — and there she was, Nadezhda Cherneshevsky, driving a Mercedes-Benz across Mars! She followed Samantha to the sorting lot, feeling like a queen.
And that was the morning. Back into the habitat, helmet and tank off, a quick bite in walker and boots. With all that running around they were famished.
After lunch they went back out in the Mercedes-Benz, and used it to haul a Boeing air miner to an area east of the habitats, where they were going to gather all the factories. The air miners were big metal cylinders, somewhat resembling 737 fuselages except that they had eight massive sets of landing gear, and rocket engines attached vertically to their sides, and two jet engines mounted above the fuselage fore and aft. Five of these miners had been dropped in the area some two years before. In the time since, their jet engines had been sucking in the thin air and ramming it through a sequence of separating mechanisms, to divide it into its component gases. The gases had been compressed and stored in big tanks, and were now available for use. So the Boeings each now held 5,000 liters of water ice, 3,000 liters of liquid oxygen, 3,000 liters of liquid nitrogen, 500 liters of argon, and 400 liters of carbon dioxide.
It was no easy task hauling these giants across the rubble to the big holding tanks near their habitats, but they needed to do it, because after they were drained into the holding tanks they could be turned on again. Just that afternoon another group had gotten one emptied out and turned back on, and the low hum of its jets could be heard everywhere, in a helmet or a habitat.
Nadia and Samantha’s miner was more stubborn; in the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachment to scrape a rough road for it all the way. Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatique. They stripped down to their dust-caked underwear and went straight to the kitchen, ravenous once more; Vlad estimated they were each burning about six thousand calories a day. They cooked and gulped down rehydrated pasta, nearly scalding their partially-thawed fingers on their trays. Only when they had finished eating did they go to the women’s changing room and start trying to clean themselves up, sponging down with hot water, changing into clean jumpers. “It’s going to be hard to keep our clothes clean, that dust even gets through the wristlocks, and the waist zippers are like open holes.” “Well yeah, those fines are micron-sized! We’re going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that. It’s going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains…”
“That’s life on Mars.” This was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.
On some days after dinner there were a couple hours of sunlight left, and Nadia, restless, would sometimes go back outside. Often she spent the time wandering around the crates that had been hauled to base that day, and over time she assembled a personal tool kit, feeling like a kid in a candy store. Years in the Siberian power industry had given her a reverence for good tools, she had suffered brutally from the lack of them. Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched — some of it even built in inches — so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch. And every desperate day’s work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.