Wilson brought the helmet down over his head. The space suit collar sealed itself to the rim. His e-butler ran checks through the suit array, and gave him the all clear.
There were nine of them getting ready in the long, composite-walled prep room. Wilson appreciated that they had to take the navy forensic office team along, but he was starting to think that maybe he would have liked a few moments alone to begin with. It wasn’t going to happen; even with Nigel’s backing, this little jaunt was expensive.
Commander Hogan was heading the investigation team; his every response formal and respectful, he seemed almost awestruck by Nigel. Wilson knew he was Rafael’s man, the one who’d replaced Myo. Not that it made him a bad person, but Wilson felt more comfortable with his deputy, Lieutenant Tarlo, who was approaching the excursion with a schoolboyish enthusiasm, and wasn’t in the least intimidated by the company he was keeping. Ever since they’d arrived in the prep room, he and Nigel had been chatting about the surf to be found on various planets. Four navy technical officers were going as well, to inspect the systems they were visiting to see what the hell the Guardians were doing with them. They were all happy about the jaunt—a day away from the office and their usual routine, an interesting technical challenge, plus getting themselves known to the admiral and Nigel Sheldon—who wouldn’t be?
“We’re ready for you,” Daniel Alster said. If Nigel’s chief aide had any misgivings about his boss taking part, he was hiding them beautifully, Wilson thought.
Nine space-suited figures tramped down a long corridor toward the gateway chamber, their bootsteps echoing loudly off the old concrete walls. Wilson’s treacherous memories replayed the time when the Ulysses crew had walked across Cape Canaveral’s main runway from the bus to the air stairs of the waiting scramjet spaceplane, their short route lined ten deep by reporters and NASA ground staff, cheering and whooping as they embarked on the first stage of their flight to another world. Meanwhile, over in California, Ozzie and Nigel were chugging beer, chasing girls, smoking joints, and building the last few components of their machine…
The gateway used to be operated by CST’s exploratory division, back in the days when they were venturing out through phase one space. That period had ended over a century and a half ago when the exploratory division packed up and moved out to the Big15; they were now transient again, en route to phase three space, their progress stalled only by the Prime invasion. But this wormhole had remained active, tucked away in a section of LA Galactic where the general public never visited. It was used for many things: emergency backup for the big commercial gateways, supplying rapid response transit for the emergency services during civil disasters, carrying reserve power circuits to the moon in the event of any regular linkage shutdown. But mainly it provided interstellar transportation for governments that couldn’t afford, or weren’t liberal enough to sanction, life suspension sentences for criminals. Even on the old phase one developed, “progressive” worlds, some crimes were regarded as needing something more than suspension, and a large proportion of convicted criminals refused suspension anyway. With characteristic opportunism, CST filled the market for such a banishment.
There were several planets in phase one space that were on the borderline of H-congruous status; if they were opened for settlement they would be hard work to live on. As CST explored and opened up hundreds of other, easier worlds, they were rapidly sidelined and consigned to a detailed entry in astronomical records and company history. Hardrock would have been one of them, a world whose life-forms were still on the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, with no land animals and only primitive jellyfish in the sea. A perfect place for the scum of humanity to be dumped, where they were incapable of doing any harm to anybody except their own kind. So once a week, CST would open the wormhole to a new location on Hardrock, send through crates of farm equipment, seed, medical supplies, and food; then the convict batch would be marched over. After that, they were on their own.
The circular gateway chamber looked crude compared to its modern equivalents, its surfaces of raw concrete and metal more suited to handling cargo rather than people. But then Wilson suspected the people who passed through here were regarded as less than cargo anyway. A Class 5-BH transRover stood on the floor, a simple open jeep used for driving around on airless worlds, with big low-pressure wheels. Several equipment cases had been loaded on the rear rack. The gateway itself was a blank circle, three meters in diameter, projecting slightly from the concave wall. A force field shimmered over it, turning the air to a slightly grainy smoke layer.
Daniel Alster gave them a tight smile. “Good luck,” he said as he left.
Wilson looked up the wall opposite the gateway to the broad window fronting the operations center. A couple of technicians were lounging on the other side of it, regarding the travelers with a disinterested glance as they joked between themselves.
“Stand by,” the gateway controller told them. “We’re opening the wormhole now.”
A pale light began to shine through the force field. Wilson turned to face it, seeing faint shadows growing across the floor behind all of the team. The light was deepening, becoming amber, then heading down toward ginger. His heart began to pick up as the color flipped all sorts of switches in his brain. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? He hadn’t realized just how much Mars had been haunting him down the centuries.
The wormhole opened. After a break of over three centuries, Wilson was once again looking out across Arabia Terra.
“Clear to proceed,” the gateway controller said.
Wilson drew a breath, staring at the stone-littered landscape. Thin wisps of ginger dust were scurrying through the ultra-thin atmosphere.
“You want to go first?” Nigel asked.
How envious he’d been of Commander Dylan Lewis all those centuries ago, the first man to set foot on another planet. Except he wasn’t; Nigel had been there waiting. Some strange atmospheric phenomena carried Ozzie’s laugh down the ages to reverberate around the chamber. “Oh, man, don’t do that, you’re going to so piss them off.”
“Sure,” Wilson said briskly. He walked through the force field.
Martian soil under his feet. Pink-tinged atmosphere banding the horizon, fading to jet-black directly overhead. A million pockmarked, jagged rocks scattered about, with rusty dust in every crevice. He scanned around, placing himself against the geography and features he could never forget. Off to his left was the rim of giant Schiaparelli, which should mean…There, just off north. Two mounds of red soil smothering the lower third of the cargo landers. Their white titanium fuselages had been scoured by the storms of three centuries, blasting away all markings and color. Now the exposed sections were tarnished curves of dark metal, the originally sharp edges of the parachute release mechanisms abraded down to warty clusters. Holes had opened up in several places, revealing the skeleton of internal struts caging black cavities.
So if the landers were there, then…He turned slowly to see the Eagle II. Sometime down the years the undercarriage had collapsed, lowering the spaceplane’s belly to the ground. The sands of Mars had claimed the craft, creating a smooth triangular dune of soil whose upper fingers of coppery grit gripped the top of the spaceplane’s fuselage. All that was left of the tailfin was a stumpy blade of bleached and brittle composite, half its original height.
“Damnit,” Wilson muttered. There was moisture in his eyes.
YOU OKAY? Anna sent in text.