He would have liked a forest they could harvest for lumber, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not for a long time. Never, unless they managed to start a forest from seeds, for which, first, they needed to turn rock into soil, for which first—
Big picture here, he lectured himself. This cave system could be the first step toward a viable colony.
“We’ve reached the cave mouth and are about to go inside,” Blake radioed. “Keep watching the weather for us.”
“Copy…that,” he made out over the hiss.
“Let’s see what we have,” Rikki said.
Flashlight in hand, barely having to duck, she strode into the cave. Without ducking, Blake followed.
The beam of her flashlight, sweeping deep into the cave, paused on a rock formation. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “Rock icicles?”
Mars had been geologically dead for so long. Did that world even have caves? “Those are called stalactites. They form from”—he needed a moment to retrieve an old memory—“calcium carbonate dissolved in dripping water.”
“They’re beautiful,” she said.
He tried to send images to Endeavour, but his connection to the shuttle kept dropping. His voice link was unintelligible static.
The radar survey from orbit had suggested the entrance opened into a large space, and the echoes of their footsteps agreed. By flashlight beams alone, he couldn’t prove it. He reached into a pocket of his flight suit.
“Flare,” he warned Rikki. With a yank on the cord, the flare ignited.
That quickly, his hopes died.
Rubble piles littered the chamber floor. Looking up, he saw where part of the roof had collapsed. Handing Rikki the flare, he focused his flashlight on the stump of a massive stalactite. Though wet with dripping water, the fracture surface looked flat. The break could not have happened very long ago. Certainly not geological time ago.
An inky something meandered along the cave floor. Stepping close, he saw the zigzag was a rift, not a shadow. When he removed a glove, the rim felt knife-edged and new.
“There’s been a…seismic event.” That he hadn’t called it an earthquake had nothing to do with precision. In subjective time, at least, the loss was too fresh. “Not long ago, either. We can’t live in these caves.”
She sighed. “It would have been nice.”
“Yeah. Well, there are other cave systems.” Ignoring sore muscles, certain that Rikki ached more, he said, “We’d best start back down.”
Lips pressed thin, she nodded.
Maybe it was just the contrast with the warm air underground, but Blake shivered as they returned to the surface. He retrieved hat and gloves from his knapsack, then radioed, “This cave is a nonstarter. We’re on our way back to base camp.”
“Walk fast,” Antonio said. “The temperature is…dropping over…that inland sea. It could…snow…more than flurries.”
“We weren’t out of touch that long,” Blake protested.
“Never…the less.”
Blake could picture the shrug.
Dark was…Dark. No world like it had ever been imagined, much less modeled. And if, by fluke, an existing weather model somehow applied? Model predictions were no better than the information that fed them. They had no sensors on the ground, and scant hours of observational data from their few weather microsats. Sudden storms might be normal here. Or not.
“How bad?” Rikki asked. She had put on hat and gloves, too.
“I can’t…tell.”
“Let’s get moving,” Blake said. With luck they could break camp, pack everything onto the shuttle, and move on to the next landing zone before the cold front ran them over.
Halfway down the hill an icy blast struck, and Blake knew they weren’t going to have that sort of luck.
The temperature plummeted. Wind howled. The snowfall, when it hit, changed in minutes from flurries to a blizzard, like the worst nor’easter he had ever seen. Beneath the snow, where the ground temperature remained above freezing, snowmelt made every footfall treacherous.
With rope and clips from his knapsack he linked Rikki and himself together. They got out their collapsible poles and cleats.
What they needed, and didn’t have, was snowshoes.
First he caught a boot tip on something hidden by snow, falling to his hands and knees, almost pulling down Rikki. He got back to his feet, and three steps later her feet flew out from under her. She went splat, flat on her back, but the snow and the knapsack cushioned the blow and she got up unharmed. Every few paces one of them went down. But for wrist loops, the hiking poles would have been long gone.
The temperature kept dropping. His electric heater was on max, for all the good that did. The distant shelter sagged under the weight of the snowfall.
“W-wait,” Rikki said, her teeth chattering. “B-blankets.”
They wrapped themselves in emergency thermal blankets, as best they could and still keep moving.
He reached under his mask to tap his headset. “Endeavour.”
No response.
“Endeavour,” he tried again, louder.
Perhaps the crackle in his earpiece intensified for a second. More likely, that was wishful thinking.
“It’s the storm. There’s too much static for the headset link.” Rikki leaned against him, her eyes wide. “We’re in trouble here, aren’t we?”
“Things could be worse,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”
Two steps later, his feet flew out from under him. He crashed to the ground with the wind knocked out of him.
And started to toboggan downhill.
And felt a yank as the safety rope went taut.
And heard Rikki’s gasp of shock and the poof! of snow as she fell.
Flapping arms and legs, he brought himself to a halt. Rikki tumbled into him; his mask flew off and he choked on snow. Together they slid another few meters before stopping. Coughing, laboring to breathe the thin air, the sky was dimmer than he remembered, or the snowfall thicker. Maybe both.
From uphill, louder and
