She giggled. They were cavemen.
Blake raised an eyebrow at her.
Retrieving an oh-two tank and mask from a tote bag, she breathed deeply. “It sneaks up on a person,” she said.
“And that’s why you, in your wisdom, decreed a buddy system.” Grinning, he pointed across the beach. “Though those two don’t sound all that buddy-buddy.”
Dana and Blake took turns, one toting pails, and the other dribbling seawater through a molecular sieve. What passed into the pools, in theory, was pure water. They had built the test ponds near the beach, but hauling water was still exhausting. With each bucketful, the way uphill to the cave looked steeper.
They rested while waiting to see if the ponds held water. All but one did. Dana hoped the sealant also meant no arsenic would leach from the ground into the ponds.
She added to the water-tight ponds, in precise ratios, sulfur, phosphorus and other trace elements from their limited stores. Nutrients whose inventory became more depleted each day they relied upon, and had to alter chemically, the native biomass….
In Petri dishes, beneath sunlamps, Carlos and Li had proven they could grow photosynthetic earthly bacteria. To feed themselves until crops came in—and no one had a theory yet how long before they could even plant crops—they needed biomass in much larger quantities. Once they got bacteria to prosper in these test ponds, they would scale up the process.
And she and Blake would fly off, to no one yet had a clue where, in search of phosphates and other nutrients. Take that, Li.
Dana was exhausted well before they finished. The sun hung low in the sky, the wind off the sea had picked up, and the temperature had plummeted. That morning, she had sweated from exertion; now, she shivered.
Pond by pond, she distributed bacterial samples. “Eat hearty,” she commanded her fellow Earthlings. You do your duty and I’ll do mine.
26
Rikki traced circles with her spoon in an otherwise untouched bowl of gummy stew: lunch, such as it was. Her back was to Blake, but she sensed his worried look. Between her foul mood and her broken arm, he hadn’t gotten much of a homecoming.
She tried to care.
“Are you all right, hon?” Blake asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, setting down the spoon. In the glow of lighting strips, the glop clinging to the utensil looked as insipid as it tasted.
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m a bit tired,” she admitted. Dog tired. Drained. Exhausted.
Whereas Blake had fallen asleep last night within minutes, oblivious to her tossing and turning.
“Uh-huh,” he said doubtfully. He gestured at the curtained opening of their little private alcove. “It’s almost time. If you’re done with lunch, maybe we should wander over.”
The last place she wanted to be was in another meeting, particularly a mysterious one. But if she stayed behind it would only bring attention, from Blake most of all. She didn’t want the attention. And so, she nodded.
He led the way, their footsteps echoing, to the soaring, stone-columned chamber that everyone called the cathedral. The two of them were the first to arrive. As they sat waiting, Rikki wished, or wished it mattered enough to her to wish, her sadness would go away.
Either way, the despair ignored her. As always.
From the corner of an eye Rikki caught Blake chewing on his lip, brow furrowed, debating with himself. No, Blake, I do not want to talk about it. She said, before he made up his mind, “At least here”—unlike aboard ship, crammed in among the coffin-like cold-sleep pods—“we have room to spread out.”
It wasn’t that she wanted to be far from Blake, returned the night before from a prospecting run. She just didn’t want to talk with him. And that was problematical because he had not let her out of his sight, annoyingly solicitous of her mood and her arm.
The latter was nothing: a clean break. Over the space of two days, industrious nanites already had the bone half knit. Also, it was her own stupid fault. A Martian weakling on Dark had no business levering boulders to help clear a more convenient landing field. Not, at least, till she’d given exercise and a whole different batch of nanites enough time to bulk her up.
The despair was different, whatever the hell had brought it on. Besides…everything.
Inside the cast her arm itched like mad. She almost welcomed the distraction.
“Seriously, are you sure you’re okay?” Blake asked her again as she scratched beneath the plaster cast with the tip of a pen.
“Suspense aside, yeah,” Rikki lied.
Li had requested the meeting. There was never any predicting what that woman had on her mind. Other than trouble.
“Just rest and enjoy the moment,” Blake told Rikki.
She tried. The soft breeze that ever sighed through the caves. The air that, if a bit thin, was eminently breathable. The sunlight that streamed through the sinkhole high overhead.
It only made her mourn for the generations who had labored in vain to make such a world of Mars. Survivor’s guilt and depression, Marvin surmised, when she had consulted the AI. She was not about to open up to Li.
Antonio and Carlos arrived and took seats on separate concrete benches. Local concrete, mixed from local materials. As time and more urgent projects allowed, the men planned to experiment with concrete construction on a larger scale.
Huh. Maybe the six of them were making progress. Rikki still couldn’t imagine ever calling this place home.
At last Dana and Li emerged from a side tunnel to join the rest. Somewhere down that twisty passage was the cavern’s most recently discovered entrance, this doorway opening onto the backside of the ridge. A view onto an endless, barren, rocky plain? Rikki hadn’t seen any point in checking it out.
Dana looked relaxed. No, happy.
It was hard to fault Dana. She and Blake had brought Endeavour home with its holds filled. They had mined enough asteroid ores, rich in sulfates and phosphates, to expand the bacterial farms a hundred times over. They could jaunt back anytime for more.
The mineral lode assured the six of them all
