Dreamer of Mars

fyi

2009-12-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

I'm now archiving the old posts as drafts, just to hopefully prevent any theft of my story. Not that I really think that would happen, but just to be safe. So when you see the old posts disappearing, don't worry! :)

It's all over except for the editing

2009-12-01T08:05:00.001-08:00

Well, there we go! The story's done: I hit 200,000 words about 45 minutes before the deadline last night. I'm glad that the story is done. I enjoyed it a lot--it was a lot of fun to write. But now the story is over. After several months of being by my side, telling me her story, directing the flow of the plot, and opening herself up to examination, Dejah is happy but tired, and has left to go live in her lovely house with Nathan.

I will miss her.

Nano post 72

2009-12-01T08:03:00.001-08:00

the next morning, the two made their way from the public transport to a large hangar at the launch pad. “I booked a private shuttle,” Nathan explained as they got closer. “I forgot to mention, I took flying lessons while you were gone. Needed to find a way to pass the time. Anyway, I'm fully certified for surface flights. Not very practical for traveling between Domes, but perfect for this trip.”

“It's not another Dome, then?” Dejah asked. Nathan loaded their bags into a small shuttle, and grinned, but didn't answer. He helped Dejah up into the small cockpit of the shuttle before climbing aboard himself.

“Buckle up. We're not going all that far, but I'd rather have us gett there in one piece.”

Dejah snapped her harness into place, and looked out the viewpane as Nathan began a cautious taxi out to the runway. In a few minutes, they were airborne, and passed through the airlock with no trouble.

The sky was a clear salmon color, and Dejah felt her spirits rise as the Dome fell behind them, shrinking into the distance. Nathan seemed fully in control of the small craft, and she leaned over to look down at the ground below. The surface of the plain was rough and pitted with craters, but from this height looked like a child's model, the textures of the dust and stones smoothed away by distance. She could see a few dust devils whirling away across the dust, leaving their distinct spiral trails, and smiled as she remembered coming across their paths in the northern deserts.

Then the craft started to descend, and Dejah looked ahead for any sign of their destination. “I don't think there's any where to land a craft like this this far out from the city,” she observed. “Are you sure you have the right place?”

“Absolutely positive,” he smiled, keeping his eyes on the instrument panel.

The shuttle came lower and lower, and Dejah began to feel a twinge of nervousness. Then she saw it. A tiny Dome, no more than one hundred meters across, sitting on the floor of the red dusty plains like a delicate bowl upended on the ground. There was a small landing strip just outside it, and Nathan put the shuttle on a course to land on it. In another moment, then had touched down and were slowing rapidly.

An airlock tube was set into the Dome, and it connected to one end of the landing strip. Nathan punched in a remote key, and the outer door of the lock opened to let them in, and closed securely before opening the inner door.

They taxied into a small hangar inside the Dome, and Dejah couldn't see what else the small area held. “Nathan, where are we?”

He shook his head. “Just wait.”

They climbed out of the shuttle, and Dejah waited for Nathan as he made sure the shuttled was secured to the floor of the hangar. Then he smiled and took her hand, and opened the hangar door.

In the center of the land protected by the dome sat a small house. It was sturdy and solid, and had two stories. The upper story had huge glass windows, opening on every direction to provide what must be a spectacular view of the red horizon. The doorways were highly arched, and Dejah recognized Nathan's distinct design.

On the far side of the house, Dejah could see that the land had been left largely undisturbed, a wide expanse of dusty soil, rough rocks, and rugged landscape. Nearer the hanger, the ground had been plowed, rolled, and flattened into an even plain; rocks had been arranged in swirling patterns, and the whole thing had the feel of a garden, though no plants could grow there.

“Nathan...” Dejah breathed. “this is amazing. Is this what you were designing for your client? I can't imagine being able to afford a private hab like this.”

Nathan put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “Dejah, you're the client for this one.”

she was stunned into silence. “wha...what?”

“You're the one I designed this for. It's ours. If you like it, this can be our home. The shuttle is ours too, I bought it at the beginning of the week. I can use it to hop into Spirit City to check on sites. You can work for anyone you want to from here, or not work at all, if you want, and never have to see one of the big Domes again.”

Dejah felt as though her heart had stopped beating. It was so beautiful, the red brick house with the windows that would glow at sunrise and sunset, the rock garden, and the wide lawn of natural Aresian soil. “Nathan, we can't afford this. The materials alone, not to mention the labor it must have cost...”

He laughed. “It did. It did cost a fortune.”

“But we can't afford..”

he kissed her, and smiled again. “you remember my cathedral, the one I was so determined to make sure that they built right?”

She nodded. “The Phoenix Cathedral. It's exquisite.”

“I sold the designs.”

“You what? Did they finally sign the creative consultant clause?”

Nathan shook his head. “No, I sold it without the clause.”

Dejah protested, “But the cathedral has to be perfect! That design is gorgeous, you can't let someone mess it up just to bring the building in a couple thousand dollars under budget.”

“Yes, I can. Dejah, you're more important to me than any building. I realized, when you left to check out Shackleton Hab, how incredibly important you are to me. And I thought I'd lost you then. I didn't know what to do. I called all the agents I could, trying to see who would give me the best price for the designs—I don't know what I was doing, I didn't know if you would ever come back. But I wanted to do something to show you how much you meant to me, even if I never saw you again.”

He grabbed her shoulders, and spun her around to face the house again. The morning sun was warm on the red bricks, and the windows caught the light and sparkled like gems. Dejah felt her throat constrict as she looked at the house. “can...Can I see what it looks like from upstairs?”

Nathan silently pulled a key on a chain from around his neck and handed it to her.

She folded her hand around it, feeling the warmth it had picked up from his body. With a shaking hand, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The floor was a dark red wood, expertly laid, and she wondered how much he had paid for real wood. It was expensive to ship across the solar system, since it was bulky and took up a lot of space. But the floors gleamed in the light, and she moved into the living room.

It was a round space, and reminded her of the common rooms at the University; the chairs were upholstered in vibrant warm colors, and thick rugs covered the floor. Imitation oil lamps were set into sconces on the walls, and several windows filtered in the daylight.

The kitchen was of polished Aresian rock tiles, and Dejah ran a hand over the uneven surface of one of the stones. It felt smooth, but almost soft, like suede.

“go see the bedroom,” Nathan whispered, standing in the doorway. In a daze, Dejah got to her feet, and walked down the carpeted hallway on the other side of the living room. The hallway turned a sharp corner, and the mustard yellow walls were hung with photographs of Aresian landscapes.

She opened the door to the bedroom, and her face broke into a wide smile of delight. There was a large bed in the center of the room, two large closets set into the wall, and a bathroom in one corner, with a large stone bathtub built into the floor. The carpet was thick and a deep chocolate color; the walls of the room were a warm buttery color, with a band of burgundy around the top of the walls. “Beautiful,” Dejah whispered.

“Check behind that door,” Nathan prompted, nodded to the door that appeared to lead outside. Dejah turned the knob, and stepped out into the sunlight.

A tunnel of clear material surrounded her, and she found herself at the foot of a curved metal staircase leading to the second story. As she climbed, she looked out over the plains toward the horizons. No sign of the Spirit City dome, though she knew it was only a few minutes away.

She reached the top of the stairwell, and pushed open the door to the second story. It was all one large room, rounded to allow a three hundred and sixty degree view of the landscape. A circular bench was built into the wall, transforming every window into a window seat. The floor was the same deep red wood, covered with rugs and pillows. Across the room was a work desk, and several painted screens were set up, on which work could be pinned and hung.

Dejah found herself sinking to the floor, and leaned against the bench, letting her eyes roam over the landscape outside. She heard Nathan come up the stairs and looked up as he knelt beside her.

“I don't know what to say.”

He put his arms around her, and they both turned to look out across the red plains. “Don't say anything, then. Just be here with me. Live here with me.”

She nodded. “It's the most beautiful place I've ever seen.”

“you gave up freedom for me, Dej. Don't think I didn't figure it out. I know how badly you wanted to stay at Shackleton. I saw your face when you got home. I couldn't stand to see you hurting like that. You need the freedom, the wide open spaces. You need the wildness that Mars has in abundance, once you get away from the Domes. I couldn't deny you that. More than anything, I want to see you happy.”

“I gave it up for you,” she whispered, letting her fingers trail across his face. “I couldn't bear the thought of breaking my promise, to always come back. I thought you wanted to be safe, to hold on to everything we had. And you gave it all up for this.”

Nathan looked at Dejah's face, her profile lit by the early morning sun. the lines of tension that he'd seen around her eyes and mouth for so long were gone, and there was a light in her eyes that he had once thought he would never see again.

She stood slowly, eyes still fixed on the huge red world outside the windows. The morning sun beat against the dust and rocks, and the land looked hot, like bricks baking in an oven. On the western edge of the land, outside the small dome, Dejah could see a thin line, like a canyon, breaking the plain. She pointed it out to Nathan.

“Yes,” he commented, “it is a small canyon, I forgot to mention it. The site scouts I talked to said that it's not big, but there are some really wonderful updrafts there, if you get familiar with the winds. I think it should be more than enough to fly the Valkyrie by.”

His words were cut off as Dejah launched herself at him, knocking the breath from his lungs as she embraced him, laughing like a school girl. “I can fly the Valkyrie here? I can really fly again?”

“As long as you promise to avoid face planting into Mars again. The medical centers of Spirit City may be only a few minutes away by shuttle, but I'd rather not have to take advantage of that.”

Dejah was hardly listenign; she could feel her heart pounding, and felt as though a great weight had been lifted from her back. She leaped into the air, whooping wildly, and tried to turn a cartwheel, but slipped and tumbled to the floor.

“Ha!” she laughed, scrambling to her feet again. “Ouch! I guess I should get into practice again before trying that.” She turned back to Nathan. “How soon can we move in?”

He grinned, and held up his comm. “I commed the movers as soon as you set foot on the staircase. They're going to pack our stuff up and have it out here tomorrow. You never have to set foot inside a Dome again, Dej, if you don't want to.”

She hiccuped, caught between a sob of joy and a laugh, and coughed for a minute, then laughed. “I don't even know how to respond.” she walked over to his side again, and wrapped her arms around him.

“I love you, Dej,” he whispered, stroking her hair. “More than anything on this world. And it's alright if you love Mars more than you love me—I can live with that. As long as we can both live with it, live here.”

She let her head fall forward, resting against his chest. “Thank you.” She let herself rest there for a moment, feeling a whirl of emotions that all ended up in joy.

They turned back again toward the windows. The sun was still rising, pulling itself up across the salmon colored sky. Dejah watched it for a minute, then turned away. “i want to go outside again, I need to be in the sunlight for a little while.” They quickly descended the stairs, and threaded their way through the house before coming back out to the stone garden.

Dejah knelt, running her hands through the dusty soil, relishing the feel of the tiny stones in the sand scraping against her skin. The dust coated her arms up to the elbows, and she laughed to see how much of it stuck to her. Brushing it off, she turned to the garden, casting an eye over the perfectly arranged stones. One section had been curled to form an intricate labyrinth, with a path that wound around and doubled back on itself until it formed a stylized flower in the middle.

The shadow of house stretched wide and black across the ground, shrinking gradually as the sun rose. Dejah walked around the house, examining it from all sides, shivering slightly as she passed into the shadow and out on the other side. She could hardly wait to see it at twilight, with the light purple all around, and the lights shining out of the upper windows. It would be like a lighthouse, she thought, visible to anyone in the area for miles around, a beacon for wanderers.

She heard the hum of the air filtration systems, and finally spotted the filters and compressors hidden behind an artistic pile of stones by the wall. She grinned, knowing that unless one knew where to look, the mechanism would be completely hidden. Nathan had spared no effort in creating the illusion of living unsupported on the barren red surface of Mars.

She walked around the rest of the house, and found Nathan still standing in the front of the house, watching her with a beaming smile. She joined him again, and turned toward the clear wall od the dome. The world was open before her feet, Dejah felt, and she turned her face toward the light to meet it unafraid.

THE END

Nano Post 71

2009-12-01T08:02:00.000-08:00

PART FOUR: “Behold, I make all things new.”

“Dej, I have something I need to do, and I'll be gone for a couple of days,” Nathan said, a few months later. “Will you be ok by yourself for a while?”

She looked up from the cup of tea she was preparing. “Where are you going? I thought you were done with site scoutings for the month.”

He nodded, trying to chew the bite of bagel that he'd just stuffed into his mouth. Swallowing hard, he cleared his throat and replied, “ahem! Yeah, I thought so to, but this one's just come up. It's for my most important client, and I can't risk getting one wrong. There's too much riding on it.”

He walked across the kitchen and hugged her tightly. “I'm sorry for being away so much, I know it's hard. I promise, after this trip, things will be much easier, and we'll be able to spend more time together. Will you forgive me?”

Dejah smiled quietly, and nodded. “Yeah, I forgive you. Just hurry home, alright?” He nodded, and went back into their bedroom to pack a bag. She watched him go down the hall, then leaned against the counter and closed her eyes.

It's still so hard, she thought wearily. It's still so hard to be here like this, day in and day out, going to work, planning missions for others to complete, and coming back home to tea and bagels. I just want to be out there on the surface again, she cried inwardly, just to be out there where it's wild and dangerous and amazing.

Nathan emerged again, bag in hand, and she pushed the thoughts away. “Have a good trip,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Comm me when you get there so I know you landed safe, ok?”

“As always.” he kissed her on the mouth, embracing her tightly. “I'm going to miss you.”

she nodded, and he sighed, moving toward the door. “If you feel lonely, you should go visit Shelle. She's been kind of lonely since Brian started school and the others are in kindergarten. I'm not sure what her schedule at Parsec's is, but she'd love to see you.”

“That's a good idea, I should go do that,” Dejah agreed. “I'll try to stop by today. Now hurry, you don't want to keep anyone waiting for you.”

he nodded, and closed the door. Dejah moved to the window and watched him cross the lawn and head up the street to catch a public transport on the larger cross street.

When he was out of sight, she relaxed, and let herself slump into the couch. It was a Saturday, and there was no need for her to go to the Dandelion offices; the weekend stretched before her, long and empty.

She went into her work space and tried to work a little bit on the project for Mars Heritage; she had a stack of images from the Phoenix site that Charles had sent to her, and she looked at the image on top, trying to remember what it had felt like to look across that plain and see her solitary trail of footprints leading over the horizon and out of sight. She tapped out a few sentences on the keyboard, reread them, and erased them with a sigh. Too cliché, and not really reflective of her actual emotions.

She tried working on the other images in the project for a while, then sighed and got up from the chair.

Dejah grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door and quickly pulled it on before stepping outside and locking the door. The day was bright and sunny, like most days when the dust storms weren't blowing, and she turned her face upward to catch the light of the sun for a few moments before walking down the street.

In twenty minutes, she pushed open the door at 12 Parsecs. It was mostly quiet, except for the ever present gaggle of pilots from the Academy seated around one of the large round tables in the corner, and she slipped into a seat at a small table in a patch of sunlight.

Shelle saw her, and walked over. “Hey Dej! What brings you out here today?”

“Nathan's off on a last minute site check,” she responded, “and he's going to be gone for the whole weekend. I didn't feel much like cooking so I thought I'd drop by for some lunch and see if you needed some company yourself while Max is gone.”

Shelle smiled, her freckles showing golden agaisnt her skin. “Actually, yeah, that would be nice! The house feels pretty empty when the kids are gone to school. I guess I'll hve to get used to it, since Max's schedule is always going to have him gone a lot, and the kids are all in school now. But company would be nice today. I get off in about two hours, is that ok? I can give you a comm when I'm headed home.”

Dejah shook her head, and smiled. “That's ok, I think I'll just grab a bite to eat and wander around the area for a little while. I haven't seen Marcus since I got back from Spirit City, and Nathan mentioned that he's been asking about me, so I'll probably stop in and say hi to him.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Shelle laughed. “So what do you want to eat today, I'll go get it started!”

Thirty minutes later, Dejah was strolling along what had once been the main street of the area, and was now simply an interesting side street, one of many to offer odd shops and restaurants. Marcus' shop looked as dark and dingy from the outside as it always had, but Dejah saw the Open sign in the window, and pushed the door open.

The familiar bell chimed rustily, and she heard Marcus' gruff voice from the rear of the shop. “Hang on a minute, hang on a minute, I'm coming,” followed by indistinguishable muttering.

“Don't trip over anything, Marcus,” she called with a grin. “I'd hate to see you trip over the piles of junk you insist on keeping around.”

There was silence for a moment, then she heard footsteps hurring between the shelves, and Marcus dashed into the front of the store, greying hair in disarray.

“Well, what do you know, it's Ms. Dejah Sorenson, back from the dead to hear some talk about it!”

She laughed, and reached out to shake his hand. “good to see you, too, Marcus. How's business been?”

He shrugged. “Oh, not so great for the store, little better for the printing press. And fantastic for stories about you. Do you have any idea how many crazy reporters came by here while you were in the hospital, trying to get any sort of scoop over the others?” He barked out a half laugh. “I was sorely tempted to just start making up a different wild story for each one of them, but once I heard that you were going to pull through, I knew that you'd pay me back for any of that kind of foolishness. They were pretty frustrated when I told them that you were neither a wild woman, nor the quiet loner type, nor a religious fanatic. They just weren't quite sure how to write about a real Aresian hero any more. I offered to send them to journalism school, but they didn't seem to appreciate that.”

Dejah rolled her eyes. “Marcus, you are incorrigible. Oh, I have something here that you might like to see.” she pulled the chain of her necklace over her head, and grabbed the pendants that hung from it. One was the meteorite pendant that Nathan had given her years ago; the other was the fragment of solar panel.

Marcus peered at her jewelry. “I regonize the one, of course, but I'm not even sure what the other one is made of. Synthetic, I take it?”

She nodded. “It's a little fragment of a solar panel from the Phoenix Lander. One of my crew who did the extrication managed to snag it, and the other helped make it into a necklace. But it's a real part of the Phoenix, something that traveled millions of miles just to give us the chance to get here.”

Marcus touched it lightly, and Dejah tipped the necklace into his hand. “Here, go ahead and take a good look at it. It doesn't look like much, but when you consider where it's been...”

The older man held the pendant delicately, turning it over in his palm. “Seems to grow warm to the touch. That's quite some souvenir you have there.” He handed the necklace back, and she hung it over her neck again, slipping th pendants inside her shirt.

“All joking aside, that really was quite a journey you made,” he commented, leaning on the front counter. “Never seen anything like it, but damned if it wasn't the sort of thign I always wanted to see. Forget being a role model for the young ones coming up, you've made some old men who just wanted to see some spirit very happy indeed.” He looked at her over the tops of his glasses. “But I hear you've been grounded, got to stay inside the dome now. Was it worth it?”

Dejah swallowed, a ssudden lump appearing in her throat. She had a sudden flash of rememberance: purple hills under a sky filled with stars, a line of footprints fading off over the horizon for miles, a few glints of metal shining proudly in the dust.

She smiled, blinking back a tear, and nodded. “Yes. It was worth it. It might not be for everyone but...it was worth it.”

“Glad to hear it,” marcus said quietly. “Very glad to hear it.”

Dejah bid goodbye to Marcus, and headed back down the street toward the restaurant. Shelle would be getting off work in twenty minutes, and it was no use trying to go anywhere else in that short of a time.

When she walked back into the restaurant, it was empty, and Shelle sat at a table in the sun, feet propped on the chair across from her, and a cup of coffee steaming in her hand. She looked at towards the door as Dejah walked in and waved. “Hey! Come join me over here, I'm just waiting for my relief to get here. It's pretty dead today.”

Dejah sat down in the chair across from Shelle as the waitress put her feet on the floor. “isn't that a little weird for a Saturday?”

Shelle shrugged. “It's hard to tell how the weekends are going to go actually. Sometimes we're absolultely slammed, other times it's so dead we'd do better to close up early for the afternoon.”

The two women chatted about work for a few minutes, until Shelle's replacement arrived, then they donned their jackets and headed back out to the sunny street. Max and Shelle lived close to the downtown area, and it was only a five minute walk to their home.

Shelle unlocked the door, and held it open for Dejah, who thanked her.

The house was warm and welcoming, but Dejah could detect a few expensive things that she was sure Max's inheritance had paid for. Shelle waved Dejah over to a comfortable chair, and sat down in a rocking chair nearby.

“So I hear that you and Nathan decided to stay in Spirit City,” shelle noted with a smile. “I'm really glad to hear that, I'd hate to see you leave. Seems like everyone is spreading out these days; it's hard to make friends before they just up and move to some other dome across the planet. The kids keep losing playmates, and it's been pretty discouraging for Sally. She's so sensitive and quiet, she doesn't make friends that easily.”

Dejah nodded, pulling her feet up under her. “Yeah, we're both going to stay. Nathan's work is here, and it just worked out better that way. Besides, I can be a free agent now—I'm still working for Dandelion, but there's a lot of opportunities for other stuff for mars Heritage and some others.” She shrugged. “Not ideal, but I've learned that the ideal isn't always possible.”

the late Sunday evening was beginning to get cold when Nathan opened the door of their home. “Dej?” he called. “Dej, I'm home!”

Dejah walked out of the work room and greeted him with a kiss. “Hey! Welcome back. How did it go?”

Nathan smiled, and Dejah thought she saw an odd look in his eye. “Oh, it's perfect. Everything is as good as I could hope for, or better. I just have to wait for the client to see it and approve it, but I think they're going to be very happy. It's some of my best work.”

“Sound great,” Dejah replied, only half listening. She punched the power button on the electric kettle and waited for it to boil. Nathan walked up behind her in the kitchen, and wrapped his arms around her waist.

“Dejah, honey, we haven't been away together in years. I've got some vacation time coming up, and I have to use it before the end of the year. What do you say we take the next few days and just get away for a while?”

“Oh, I don't know,” she responded, carefully pouring the now boiling water into a cup. “You just got back, it seems awfully soon to be heading out again. You don't have to hurry for my sake, I've been fine.” She dropped a tea bag into the cup to steep.

Nathan grabbed her hands, and bent down to look her in the eyes. “Dejah, this is important to me, too. I know that you don't like being stuck in the Dome, and I really want to take you out of here for a little while. Please, just...just trust me, this one time.”

The look in his eyes made her pause. He didn't look angry, or frustrated, or even tired. Just sad and...something else. A little hopeful, she wondered.

“alright. I can pack some stuff and be ready to go tomorrow morning, I just need to let a few people know that i'll be away from my projects for a few days.”

Nathan smiled in relief, and gave her a hug. “You won't regret it, Dej, I promise.”

Nano Post 70

2009-12-01T08:01:00.002-08:00

Dejah lay in her bed, in a room loaned to her by one of the other Shackleford residents. The room was small but clean and sturdy, and she looked out of the window. In the distance, she could see the horizon, lit by starlight. It seemed so close, she thought sleepily, as if she could get out of bed and simply walk there in a few minutes.

She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling; there were too many things going through her mind for her to sleep. Everything at Shackleford felt exciting and new, like the University had felt, and Bradbury Dome during the two years she had spent in the intense training there.

She exhaled sharply and sat up. “I can’t sleep like this,” she muttered. She slipped out of the bed, and walked over to the window. Half of the small town lay between her and the edge of the wall, and the rough plastered roofs looked like rows of miniature hills in the starlight. Several windows were still lit, and the yellow light bounced off of a few brick walls, casting odd pools of warm light in the cold chill of the night.

Dejah breathed in deeply. It wasn't that the air here felt any different than in any other Dome, she mused, but somehow this tiny hab had far more room to breathe.

“down there,” she pointed out a small mound to herself. “that's where I'd live. A nice little set of rooms, in this fantastic brick. And as many windows as I can get without losing too much heat from the building, windows that would look out directly on the Dome so I could see all the way through to the horizon. East facing, so I could see the sun rise every morning. And there might even be enough of a draft in that gully to get the Valkyrie airborne again.”

She was swept up in memories of flying high, soaring over the Aresian landscape, and closed her eyes. If she really thought about it, she could recall the way the wind rippled over her suit and swept bits of dust across her helmet. The wonderful sound of the thin atmosphere filling the wings with a sudden whoosh when she banked hard for a turn, and the sudden shock to her legs when the ground came up just a little too fast during a landing.

Unbidden, the image of Nathan's face rose up in her mind, and she frowned. She tried to push the thought away, and recapture the memory of flight, but the moment had passed.

Dejah sighed and opened her eyes. “Can't I dream, just for a few minutes?” The silent city gave her no answer.

She settled into a chair, and sat, still facing the window. “Nathan really is a good man,” she whispered to the sleeping town, as if the buildings could answer her. “It's not like I'd be leaving him for someone else. I don't have any interest in anyone else. I just...” she paused, searching for the words. “he was right, after all. I love Mars more than I love him, more than I could ever love him. But he just doesn't understand, I can't live without this red dust, without that beautiful orange sky. I'd rather rip open my suit myself out on the plains than live for another forty years in that stifling Dome.”

The stars passed quietly over the town as she struggled to make her decision. She wished that Max was there to talk it over with, but he had been offered a room across town, near the hangar, and she wasn't quite sure which building it was. “And anyway,” she muttered, “I don't think his hosts would be particular happy to answer the door at three in the morning.”

she glanced over her shoulder at the mirror that hung over the simple dresser. Her face looked odd in the cold light; the dim illumination that lit the scene came from the window behind her, and her face was shadowed, though her mussed hair created a glowing aureole around her head. One cheekbone caught the light, turning her face half purple. She didn't look tired, she mused, so much as desperate and confused.

“You shouldn't be confused,” she told the face in the mirror. “This should be simple. It's the answer to all of your problems. You can let Nathan go find some nice girl who's happy to stay in the Dome, and he'll be happier. You can go back to doing the kind of work you love—surely there's a med center here that's robust enough to take care of any injuries that might happen. And this Dome's so small, it would feel almost like living on the bare surface, and you could be closer to the surface than ever.”

But the face in the mirror refused to relax, and she turned away, irritated. “Why isn't it enough,” she muttered. “It really would be easier.”

“But since when did you take the easy way?” she answered herself, getting out of the chair and pacing the room, as she always did when frustrated or confused.

“It's not like life here would be easy, in and of itself. It'd probably be a lot harder, and I'll die a lot younger than I would in the Dome. But...” she groaned with irritation and ran her hands through her hair, mussing it further. “It would be too easy just to leave. I've never backed down from anything I said I would do.”

The room grew colder as the night progressed, but Dejah didn't notice, pacing until her legs were sore. Finally, exhausted, she dropped into the bed just as the sun was beginning to rise. Shivering, she pulled the covers over herself as she fell into an uneasy sleep.

A few hours later, a knock sounded at her door. “Ms. Sorenson? We're sorry to wake you, but it's getting rather late, and your friend is here to fly you home. Are you alright?”

Dejah sat up, head muddled and thoughts still whirling. “Yes, I'm fine. Thank you for checking—please tell Max that i'll be down in a few minutes.”

She lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, then exhaled and rolled off the bed.

“Hey, there's the sleepyhead!” Max called as she came downstairs, holding her overnight bag in one hand and brushing her hair with the other.

“ha ha, very funny. Says the man who never woke up on time for school a day in his life.” She grinned, and set the bag down at the foot of the stairs to pull her hair back into her customary ponytail.

Her hosts bid her farewell after she turned down their offer of breakfast, and she and Max made their way back to the hangar. The Silver Hammer was quickly loaded, and Max waited until Dejah fastened her harness to start the engines. They slowly taxied through the airlock, then Max pushed the spacecraft forward, and they launched into the sky with a roar.

Dejah looked into the rear view pane, watching the city dwindle quickly in the distance, until it looked like no more than a soap bubble that had landed on the red sands for a moment before bursting.

They flew in silence for a few moments after leaving the Shackleford airlock. Then Max checked the instrument panel and asked, “so, what did you think? Gonna make it home any time soon?”

she didn't reply for a moment, looking down at the dusty plains as they passed below the ship.

“Dej? You ok?”

“Yeah, sorry, just didn't get much sleep last night. Spent a lot of time thinking. If you'd asked me that question last night, I probably would have asked how quickly you could fly all of my stuff out here. I mean, it really is perfect for me, isn't it? I wish it had been an option after school. Seems awfully cruel to have gotten married when I just can't be what Nathan really wants. Maybe we shouldn't have married; he was right when he accused me of loving Mars more than I love him. Can't really help that now; it is what it is. But I got to thinking last night.” she paused, trying to clear her head and get her thoughts in order.

“Max, you've known me since I was ten years old. Have you ever known me to give up on anything once I put my mind to it?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No, I have not. I would, in fact, say that sheer pig headedness is one of your most distinct traits, for better or worse.”

“That's pretty much the conclusion I came to last night. If I came here, Nathan wouldn't want to come, even if he could. This place would drive him crazy, at least as crazy as Spirit City drives me. That's not fair.”

“Pretty sticky situation, Dej. You always did have a knack for getting tangled up in things and needing my expertise for getting you out.”

She leaned back against the seat, letting her head rest against the cushion, and closed her eyes with weariness. “Yes, it is. But I should have known better. I should have seen this coming. But I wanted Nathan so much that I ignored any of the problems. And I made a promise. I've never gone back on anything before, and I don't intend to do it now.”

Max kept his eyes fixed on the view out of the front window, but she could tell that his attention was on her. “So you're not going to take their offer?”

Dejah shook her head. “No. It would just be a kind of running away, and I'm not going to resort to that sort of thing. I'd never be able to look at my face in the mirror again, knowing that I'd run out on something I had been determined to do.”

“does Nathan know yet? Did you talk to him on the comm this morning?”

“No, I figured that it was the sort of thing that I should probably tell him in person. If he still wants out, I'll let him. I don't want him to feel trapped in the marriage. But I really do want to make it work, if possible. Maybe I can just take a vacation to a small hab once a year or something.”

Max turned and studied Dejah for a moment, noting how tired she looked. “You really think that will be enough for you, Dej?”

She laughed bitterly. “Of course it won't be enough! But, there's more to life than just being happy. If I stay with Nathan, maybe I let myself down, let go of my dreams. Whatever. If I moved to Shackleford Dome, I'd let down Nathan and myself, by refusing to honor my promise. This is the only choice. And I think you knew that before I did.”

He nodded. “I thought it might be the case. You made me pretty nervous back there, though. I thought I might have been wrong, that you would actually throw everything away and start over there.”

“would you have thought less of me if I had done it?” she asked.

“Yes. You would still have been one of my closest and dearest friends, but yes, I would have thought less of you.” He looked her in the eyes, and she saw the depth of feeling in his gaze. “You truly are an incredible woman, Dejah. All of your new fans out there will never know just how amazing you really are.”

dejah was asleep when the Silver Hammer landed, and Max carefully shook her shoulder until she woke up. She groaned and stretched before loosening her harness. “Argh, I hate falling asleep on those long flights! I'm always so stiff when I wake up later.” She hopped off the ship, and caught the bag that Max tossed to her. “Hey, watch it, do you handle all of your passenger's luggage like that? Premium shipping, like hell.”

He grinned. “Oh, bugger off, you crazy Aresian. Get some actual sleep tonight, will you?”

She nodded, and turned to go home. The sky was dark, and the stars swung overhead; Jupiter shone brightly down on the city.

The door creaked slightly as she opened it. She winced, and closed it quickly, hoping that it hadn't disturbed Nathan's sleep. She tiptoed into the living room, planning to sleep on the couch so as not to wake her husband.

But to her surprise, the light over the kitchen table was still on, and the table was covered with colorful designs in brilliant red, orange, and yellows. She recognized the phoenix colors of Nathan's cathedral design.

Nathan himself was slumped over the table, half covering the drawings, and Dejah couldn't help smiling at the sight of the thin line of drool that escaped from the corner of his mouth. The silence of the house was occasionally broken by a soft snore.

She laid a hand on his shoulder, and shook him slightly. “Nathan, dear, you can't sleep here, you'll throw out your back. Come on, wake up and let's get you into bed.”

“Huh?” he muttered as he woke up slowly, looking around in confusion. “Dej! You're home!” He quickly began gatehring up the scattered papers and stacking them on one of the kitchen chairs. “I thought you'd stay for a few days, see what life was like over there.” he paused, setting down the stack of papers in his hands. “but...are you staying? Or are you going to go?”

she sighed, and grabbed his hand. “Here, let's go sit on the couch, where it's comfortable, and I'll tell you more.”

Nathan sat down heavily on the couch, and Dejah lowered herself onto the cushions beside him, curling her legs underneath her and leaning on the back of the couch so she could look him in the eye.

“Nathan, I've made my decision.”

He looks scared, she thought with a pang, scared that I'm going to say something to hurt him. She quickly continued, “I'm not going to take the job. I want to stay here with you and try to make this work.”

He let out a breath quickly, and exclaimed “really? You're really going to stay?”

she nodded. The next moment she found herself wrapped in his arms, with his face buried in her neck. “I missed you so much,” he said, “I missed you so much!”

Dejah woke again in the middle of the night. Nathan's arms were around her waist, and she carefully disentangled herself and went to look out of the window.

Phobos was passing overhead, on its journey down to the horizon, and it added a pale white light to the city, turning the shadows more blue than purple. The streetlights outside dimmed the moonshadow, but she could still see the faint shadows that moved across the ground as the moon sailed by.

It's still beautiful here sometimes, she thought sadly, but you have to know where to look for it.

She stared out of the window until the moon had dropped out of sight, and her skin was cold from the night air. Shivering, she climbed back into the bed, and turned her back on the window.

nano post 69

2009-12-01T08:01:00.001-08:00

Nano post 68

2009-12-01T07:51:00.000-08:00

Dejah sat listlessly in front of her computer, paging through messages that had piled up over the last few days. There were many emails from well wishers, fans, and friends, as well as a slew of offers from various corporations, offering her jobs as a spokesperson, or advocate, or representative.

She scrolled through the offers, hardly seeing them. She was about to turn away from the computer when a final message caught her eye; the subject line read, “An opportunity from SurfaceTech.”

Dejah hesitated, torn between opening the message and reading about yet another job that was now closed to her, and deleting the message unread and wondering forever about what she might have missed. With a sigh, she selected the message and opened it.

“Ms. Sorenson,” the message began, “I hope that you will excuse me for contacting you so soon after your return to Spirit City, but I trust that you will be interested in this opportunity. SurfaceTech is a select group of scientists, engineers, geologists, and other Aresians, who are dedicated to discovering new ways to take advantage of the natural resources of our world. We spend our time working very close to the surface in a small hab in the northern hemisphere, developing and testing new technologies that will help facilitate the progression of human life on Mars. We would like to offer you a permanent position as exploration consultant for SurfaceTech. This would involve moving to our hab and working directly with the engineers and scientists who create our technology, as well as soon testing of the equipment. I have attached a folder of pictures from our hab and some of our recent equipment tests. We would like to extend an invitation to you to come visit us here, and see for yourself what we are doing. Please get in touch with me if you are interested. Yours, Richard Jordan, SurfaceTech Industries.”

Intrigued, she opened the folder of photos and began paging through them. The hab was obviously very small, perhaps only a quarter of a kilometer across, and there were only a hundred or so people living there. The buildings were small and rough, and much of the life of the community seemed to focus around the laboratory and manufacturing facility in the middle of the town. Several of the photographs showed various teams in exploration suits on the Martian surface outside the hab, testing equipment and checking data.

As she paged through the pictures, she felt a faint tug of hope. Perhaps there was still a place for her on Mars, after all.

“So they want you to move there?” Nathan asked, and Dejah could hear a hint of nervousness in his voice. She sat at the table, flipping through a printout of the message and photos.

“If I took the job, yeah, it’d be a permanent thing. I mean, I guess I could go back and forth, particularly if Max gets that shipping company going.” She watched him move around the kitchen, chopping vegetables and tossing them into a small pan. He didn’t look happy, but seemed to be trying to keep his emotions in check.

“You know I couldn’t move there, Dej,” he said quietly. “I need to be in a larger Dome to visit the sites for the clients. Besides, in a small focused community like that, there’s no room for someone who is just along for the ride. Everyone has to give everything they have, and I couldn’t do that there.”

Dejah nodded, turning her eyes back to the photographs. “I know.”

Nathan stood by the stove, and watched her for a minute. She sat quietly at the table, paging through the information on the hab, with no expression on her face. He put a lid over the sautéing vegetables and turned off the heat under the pan, then pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from her.

“Dejah, I wonder sometimes if we did the right thing, getting married.”

She looked up, but didn’t respond.

“I’m sure you already know that I don’t want you to leave. I’ve always loved you, and always will. But do you know what I want even more than to see you stay?” He reached out and put his hand on hers. “I want to see you happy again, to see you excited and passionate and ready to risk everything. If the only way for that to happen is for you to leave, then you should go. I won’t fight it.”

Dejah squeezed his hand, and gave him a smile. “I don’t know yet. I just want to go look, that’s all.”

Max landed the Silver Hammer on the runway outside the hab, and quickly let it roll through the airlock and into the small hangar just inside the dome.

“These runway airlocks always make me nervous,” he muttered as they slowed to a halt. Dejah stepped out of the ship, and turned to see a young man walking toward her, hand extended.

“Ms. Sorenson! I’m so glad you could come, I’m Richard.” He shook her hand, and smiled. “Welcome to Shackleford Hab.”

“Thanks for inviting me. This is Maxwell Hamm, my old friend; he’s one of the best pilots in the business. Do you mind if he sees the hab, too?” Dejah asked.

“Oh, not at all! We love having people come and see what we’re doing here—we just don’t have the space to have most of them live here. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

They followed Richard out of the hangar, and out into the town. Dejah looked up, and smiled as she saw the roof of the dome, so much closer than any other she had ever seen. The walls of the dome were visible from any place in the town, and no effort had been made to hide them.

“This dome tends to make some visitors a little nervous,” Richard commented. “Most people aren’t used to seeing the walls of the dome, and the smallness of it makes them nervous. They say it makes them feel like it could collapse at any moment. Most of us actually prefer it that way, it doesn’t get in the way of the landscape so much.”

Dejah nodded, still smiling, and took a deep breath. “I like it, too.”

“We’re so honored that you considered our offer,” he continued. “When we heard about the incredible risks you took, it was the talk of the entire community. We want to find ways to make even greater things possible, and your help would mean so much to that effort.” He grinned. “Besides, you seemed like the sort of person who would be just crazy enough to move to a tiny habitat in the middle of nowhere on the off chance that you might find something interesting. Our sort of person.”

The town, though small, seemed to hum with activity, and it reminded Dejah of the buzz of Bradbury Dome. The buildings were mostly low one story constructs, with a few exceptions. The residential buildings were built from bricks fired from the red sand in the area, and Richard explained that the bricks helped lock in a lot of the sun’s heat.

He opened a door into one of the few two story buildings in the main complex at the center of the town. “This is our main area of activity; we have some exercise grounds, obstacle courses, and testing areas outside the dome, but this is where the labs are, along with our main construction and manufacturing lines. Of course, once we patent a design, we send it off to one of the larger Domes for mass production, but we make the prototypes here for testing. Gives us great flexibility in the design, more control over the whole process, and of course, a much faster turnaround time between different versions.”

In sharp contrast to the rough warm brick of the exterior, the inside of the building was clean and bright, with an almost surgical feel. A line of windows gave a view from the hallway into a large room that occupied half of the building. Inside, several people in clean coveralls worked at a variety of machines; sparks flew from a welding torch in one corner of the room, and Dejah could hear the high pitched whine of a metal saw.

“Right now, they’re working on a new kind of breather—we hope that incorporating our design into a helmet will make it not only more efficient, but a lot lighter and easier to wear,” Richard explained.

They wound through the building, Richard explaining things as they went. As they came out on the far side of the building, he turned to Dejah. “I know it’s a lot to take in at once, and really, there’s no way to fully grasp what life is like here without actually living here, day in and day out. We haven’t got much time left before the sun goes down, so would you like to take a quick tour of the area around the hab?”

Dejah grinned. “You have no idea how much I want to see this place from the outside.”

The trio headed back to the airlock, and Richard showed Max and Dejah were the exploration suits and helmets were kept. In a few minutes, they had suited up, and Richard started the engine on a large four seater rover and pulled into the airlock. “Helmets on, check your seals every one!” He pressed a remote to shut the inner door of the airlock, and Dejah heard the familiar sound of air being siphoned from the lock. Then the outer door opened, and the rover roared out into the thin air of Mars.

Dejah felt her spirits rise as the rover exited the airlock tube, and she ran her eyes along the ragged red horizon.

“There’s something that I’d like you to see here,” Richard said over the comm. “There’s some magnificent formations down here in the gully. We found them when we were doing some preliminary geological exploration, and it’s since become a favorite place for many of us to go.”

The road slowly wound through the landscape, and Dejah noticed that the path was sinking into the red dust, and small hills and cliffs were rising on either side of them. After a few minutes, the road had become the bottom of a gully, and the dusty hills sloped up around them, cutting off the horizon. At a sharp curve in the path, Richard pulled the rover to a halt.

There was a single dirt mountain rising from the inside curve of the gully, and the peak was dramatically silhouetted against the sky. A few meters away, the face of the cliff was broken by a tall narrow opening, like a keyhole leading back into the hills.

“It’s kind of narrow back in here, but you can make it. The walls are smooth so you don’t have any risk of snagging your suits.” He lead them back into the opening in the cliff.

Dejah took a step into the narrow passageway and was surprised to find that it twisted to the side almost at once. The thin opening was difficult to navigate in the thick exploration suit, but she pressed forward. She could hear Max behind her as he stumbled over an outcropping of rock, and swore quietly. The daylight was quickly blocked out by the numerous twists of the passage. They wound their way back into the cliff; after about ten meters, Dejah felt the walls peel back, and stepped into a wide open space.

“Richard?” she called tentatively. “Max?”

“I’m here, Dej,” she heard Max say as he stepped into the chamber.

“Just lean up against the wall for a minute,” Richard replied. “Give your eyes a few minutes to adjust, and then I’ll turn on a light.”

The silence in the cave was thick, and Dejah could feel a layer of extremely fine dust covering the floor of the cavern.

“Now try waving a hand in front of your face,” Richard said quietly.

Dejah lifted her hand and waved it, and let out a gasp. “I can see my fingers now!” She wiggled her gloved fingers, seeing faint black shapes moving against the background

“Hey, Dejah, look up there!” Max shouted, and Dejah looked up. Twenty five meters above her head was a faint oval of light.

“A skylight?” she asked.

“Yes,” Richard replied. “It’s a few meters off to the side, so we only see the reflected light, but it’s enough to give some light here inside the cavern. In the middle of the day, it gets light enough in here to see each other by.”

“Spectacular,” Max pronounced, and Dejah could hear the wonder in his voice.

“Most of these hills are hollow,” Richard explained, and Dejah could dimly see him walking around the far wall of the cavern. “We think it’s due to water ice subliming and leaving spaces behind that then get worn down from the wind, but we’re not entirely sure. This whole area is just hard packed dirt, not rock, and so it erodes relatively easily. Over the years, you can see subtle changes in here as the wind and ice wear away the dust. There’s a cavern near here that’s collapsed into a sort of slot canyon, and there’s another one that’s just beginning to open up. Another couple of decades, and we can probably even crawl through that one.”

They edged back out through the narrow path into the cavern, and came back into the open gully, blinking in the dim purple twilight.

nano post 67

2009-11-30T08:28:00.000-08:00

(this is everything I have so far, about 190,000 words. Almost done!!!)

Dejah spent most of the next few days, working in her workspace, measuring images and carefully arranging them on the wall. Nathan often heard the printer running first thing in the morning, and Dejah no longer took naps during the afternoon.

One morning, he walked into the kitchen to find Dejah already eating a quick breakfast of oatmeal and tea.

“you're up early today,” he yawned. “Something going on?”

She nodded. “Doctor's appointment. They're going to run some tests, see how much my body's healed, tell me when I can go back to work, and what sort of work I can do.”

“Oh right!” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sat down across from her. “Are you nervous?”

She shrugged. “A little. Mostly just ready for it to be over. I'm not nearly as tired as I used to be, and I haven't needed a nap in the afternoon in three days.” She checked the clock on the wall, and jumped up, grabbing her coat from the hook by the door. “I gotta run, appointment is in twenty minutes! Wish me luck!”

“good luck!” he called after her, hearing the door slam shut halfway through the phrase.

Dejah sprinted through the streets, which were still dim in the mauve morning light. Yellow lights shone from most of the windows she passed, and the air had a pleasant chill to it. The exertion kept her warm, and she lost herself in the feeling of her shoes pounding against the ground, and the effort of keeping her breathing regular.

She saw the doctor's office ahead, and slowed to a quick walk, then stopped to stretch a bit as she let her body cool down. She glanced at her reflection in the glass door and tried to slow her rapid breathing. With a final deep breath, she pushed the door open, and greeted the receptionist with a smile.

“good morning,” the girl behind the counter said, smiling with a row of perfect white teeth. “Are you ms. Sorenson, Doctor Huston's seven o'clock?”

Dejah nodded, and the woman held out a clipboard. “Terriffic! Just fill these out for me, since you're a new patient, and we'll get started.”

“Actually, I think my records were supposed to have been transferred from the hospital in Bradbury Dome,” dejah pointed out.

“Oh, they were! We just need each of our new patients to fill out one of these here, for our records. It's just policy.” The woman's smile never faltered, and Dejah took the clipboard back to a row of oddly uncomfortable chairs by the curtained window. A few minutes later, she returned the completed form to the receptionist, and sat back down.

As she waited, she pulled back the edge of the curtain that shut out the growing morning light. A faint cloud of red dust rose from the fabric, and she wondered how often the curtains were disturbed. Apparently, not too many patients wanted to see the outside world while they waited.

“Ms. Sorenson?” dejah looked up to see a smiling nurse standing in the doorway, holding the clipboard with her forms on it. “Doctor Huston is ready to see you now!”

Dejah stood, letting the curtain fall back into place with another puff of dust, and followed the nurse into the corridor behind the receptionist's desk. The hallway was a cold offwhite, and Dejah couldn't quite identify the smell that met her senses as she walked down the hall. The nurse stood beside a door and gestured to the room. “If you'll just take a seat on the table in here, the doctor will be with you shortly.”

Dejah stepped into the room and looked around. There was a table in the middle of the room with a thin paper covering; the walls were plastered with various posters depicting healthy teeth, bones, and skin.

She hoisted herself on to the table, and sat waiting. A few minutes later, the doctor bustled into the room, eyes fixed on a clipboard. “Hello Ms. Sorenson, I've got your records here from my colleagues at the Bradbury Dome hospital. It likes like you're doing a lot better than you were when they sent you home!” He smiled and shook her hand.

“Well, I just want to run some basic physical tests. If you'll follow me, I'll get you hooked up to the treadmill for the stress test.”

An hour later, Dejah was back in the small off white room, feeling more tired than she had in a week. The doctor sat in a high chair near the table, flipping through several print outs, and making notes on a chart. Finally he lowered the clipboard, and turned to her.

“Alright, I've got most of your results here. There are a few others that I'll send out to the lab, but the ones we really need I was able to pull myself. The long and short of it is that you are one tough lady. There aren't many people who could survive what you've been through, and even fewer who could make this quick of a comeback. Seems like there's a part of you that is just determined to keep on going.” He smiled at her, and Dejah tried to return the gesture, wishing he would just get on with it.

“now, what you want to know is how much you can expect to do from this point on. There's no doubt in my mind that you can live a perfectly normal life inside the Domes. Life here is comfortable enough that you should have no problems with it. But you want to know about going back out on the surface of the planet.”

He leaned forward, and looked her in the eye. “I will be honest with you, Ms. Sorenson. I am not comfortable with the thought of you spending much time on the surface. Your respiratory and circulation systems were damaged by the cold and low pressure of the surface during your trek, and there's not much we can do about that. Under normal oxygen and pressure, you're fine. But get a small rip in a suit, or lose pressure in a tent, and you'd be gone in minutes. However, that's hardly a fair restriction to place on a Scout, particularly one of your caliber. So I am going to send my recommendation to Dandelion, that you be placed back in the field, provided that you always stay within twenty minutes of a Dome by shuttle. That distance should still allow any hospital to get to you, in case of emergency, fairly quickly. I wish I could do more, but to go any further would be reckless, and would probably endanger your life.”

He stood, and held out a hand. In a daze, Dejah shook it limply, and slid off the table.

“Your employer is covering all medical costs, so just check with the receptionist on your way out, and she'll give you the form to sign. Best of luck to you, Ms. Sorenson.”

Dejah walked down the hall and signed the form she was given without really paying any attention to it. She made her way home through the streets, which were now bright with the morning light.

Nathan came home several hours later, and found the house dark. “Dej?” he called out, turning on the living room lights. “Are you here? How'd the doctor's visit go?”

When he got no reply, he glanced through the kitchen, and was about to check the bedroom when he saw a light under the closed workroom door.

Knocking quietly, he opened the door, and poked his head inside. For the last few days, Dejah had kept her area hidden by pinning up a dark curtain across the entrance to her side of the room, but the curtain had been torn down, and lay in a heap on the floor. Dejah sat in the center of her workspace, surrounded by images of the Phoenix site that she had painstakingly cropped and joined together to make a panarama that covered the walls of her space. She had covered the light with a thin film of orange plastic, giving it the warm hues of the sun outside the Dome.

“Dej...” Nathan said quietly, and she turned to face him. The look on her face cut him to the core. “Dej...is this because of the doctor visit?”

“I can't go outside the Dome any more,” she said queitly, her voice rough with emotion. “Not more than twenty minutes from a Dome by shuttle, and no more than five hours at a time. No exploration mission is that short, that close to the Dome.”

Her voice sounded dead, and Nathan knelt by her side. “You've got to move past this, Dej. You've overcome everything else life has thrown your way, don't let this be the thing that gets you in the end.”

“I don't know how to live without Mars, without Mars the way I know it,” she whispered, tracing a finger across the image of a rocky plain. “I wish I did. I tried to be happy here in the Dome, Nathan, I really did. I wanted to learn how to be content here, to love the people in my life more than I love this cold red desert. But I just can't. I'd rather walk out into that cold and die choking on the surface than live another fifty years under glass.”

He didn't respond, but simply put his arms around her. She shook with emotion, but didn't let out a sound.

nano post 66

2009-11-30T08:27:00.000-08:00

Dejah made her way home as the light grew dim and purple. It was barely five o'clock, but she felt exhausted. The streets were brightly lit, and on corners where people tended to gather, the city had erected large heaters. She could feel a blast of warmth as she passed each one, but it quickly dissipated into the night when she moved forward.

Lights were lit in most of the buildings she passed as she moved into a more residential area. The shadows were dark black and the last of the light was fading from the western edge of the sky when Dejah unlocked the door of her home and walked inside.

“Dej, is that you?” Nathan called out.

“Yeah, sorry it's so late. I ended up stopping by the University, and kind of lost track of time.”

He emerged from the work room, and flopped onto the couch, patting the cushion next to him. Dejah smiled and sat down, leaning lightly against him.

“Sounds like fun. The University never really seems to change as much as the rest of the town.”

“Probably because they don't have that much space,” she replied. “I went to go see the Spirit memorial again, you remember how much I used to like to go there. Some kid recognized me and asked me to sign his geology book. That was cool, but a little weird.”

“I bet.” He ran the ends of her hair through his fingers.

“Then I went up into the balcony of Robinson, and listened to a lecture that Livingstone was giving.”

“What class was it for?”

She laughed. “I couldn't tell. It could have been history, geology, or survival techniques. You know how his lectures are. But it was good, you know. All the old stuff about making a difference here, creating a culture. It helps to hear the reminder sometimes. Anyway, when the lecture was over, I went downstairs to see him. It was just like it used to be, with a group of three or four students hanging around, just waiting to hear whatever random bits of his philosophy he cares to expound on, hoping that they can say something that he'll compliment. Some things never change.”

Nathan laughed, and Dejah continued. “Anyway, I went down to see him, and he was really excited to see me. I'm not sure what the students were thinking—most of them left around that time, anyway. He'd said some stuff about me being the ideal University grad, and it just made me feel weird, like he was putting too much focus on me or something.”

“I thought you wanted to make your mark on the world. Isn't being recognized part of that?”

she shrugged. “I don't know any more. I realized something lately. Well, really, it was Livingstone who pointed it out, or at least put into words what I was thinking. He quoted some poem, and I don't remember most of it, but there was this one line...'Runners whom renown outran, and the name died before the man.' Now that I've made my mark, it's just another goal for someone else to pass. I never really thought of it before, but it's exactly what I was trying to do myself—go past what anyone had done before. Now someone will come along who goes beyond anything I've done. If I'm lucky, it'll happen after I'm dead and I won't have to watch it happen.”

“you don't want to be somebody else's inspiration?” Nathan looked at her curiously.

“Well...Yes, but that's not all I wanted. I just...” she struggled to find the words. “I just don't want to be stuck on the inside looking out.”

“don't you mean, 'on the outside looking in'?”

Dejah shook her head. “No, I don't want to be inside. That's where you get trapped. I want to be able to go out.”

Dejah woke earlier the next morning, her muscles not as stiff as they had been in previous weeks. As she pulled her hair back, she looked at her face in the mirror. At first it didn't seem too different from the face she'd seen in the mirror every morning at school. But as she looked closer, she saw the thin network of lines around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was not as soft as it had once been, and more of it came out in her brush now. It was still the pale blond it had always been, but she knew that there were several silver hairs among the gold.

I never noticed how much I look like my dad, she thought, turning her face to one side, then the other. Finally, she wrapped an elastic band around her ponytail and left the bathroom.

She got dressed and made her way into the living room. Nathan had a pile of papers spread out on the table, full of designs and notes. He was on the comm with someone, and she walked by him into the kitchen, plugging in the tea kettle and getting her breakfast together.

“No, that's just not going to be good enough,” she heard Nathan say, the frustration seeping into his voice. “If I can't be on board as a consultant, they're going to start changing things when they get to the site, and then the design will go all to hell. I can't have my name on another one of those. I don't care how many awards the last one won, it wasn't my design anymore by the time they got done.”

Dejah dropped a tea bag and a spoonfull of sugar into a mug, and glanced at her husband over her shoulder. It's not like him to be this upset with someone on the phone, she thought.

“No,” he continued, “I'm sorry, but that's final. I'm not selling the rights to that design without that clause in the final agreement. If they don't like it, they'll just have to find something else.” Another pause. “Yes, well, I'm sorry, too. I'm sure that someday someone will come along who is more than willing to sign the full agreement, and then we'll get it built. Thanks for trying, Paul. Yeah, talk to you later.” He put the comm down, and leaned back in his chair, arms braced behind his head.

“Something wrong with a project?” Dejah asked, pouring hot water into her cup and stirring it slowly.

“Oh, just the usual problems. “I'm trying to sell my cathedral design. It took me nearly two years to refine it, figure out all of the materials, get everything just right. And there are several companies interested in buying the design--”

“Wait,” Dej interrupted. “Companies interested in building a church? That seems weird.”

“Not really, when you think about it. If they build the place they can either rent it to the congregation that wants it, or they can donate it. A complete tax write off, and they get their names attached to something that's certain to be an attraction to visitors. A space like that can actually generate revenue for a city, if they bring in concerts or other productions.”

“Oh, ok,” Dejah said, sipping her tea. “sorry, didn't mean to interrupt.”

“No, that's ok. So anyway, there are several companies that really want the rights to this design, but you know how it goes when they settle in to actually build something. Costs are always more than they expect, and they start cutting corners with no thought for the design. This is my masterpiece, and I want a clause in there that brings me on as a consultant, to make sure that the design is either followed to the letter, or if there is some physically necessary change, that I get to be the one to design around it. Nobody wants to sign on to that one.” He slapped a hand down on the table top, sending several papers fluttering to the floor.

“It'll still be incredible, even if they have to make some changes to the design,” Dejah commented, looking through the designs and remembering the stained glass that had looked like flame in the night. “It would be the most beautiful building on Mars, and you won't let them build it?”

He sighed. “I don't want my name on it if it isn't right, and I sure as hell don't want someone else's name on it. One of these days someone will sign off on that clause, and then they'll all wish that they'd had the courage to do it.”

He drained the dregs of tea that had cooled in his cup as it sat on table and made a face. “I've got to run, Dej, they need me out on a site today, so I can take some measurements and check the light; they need the final design in a week, so it's kind of urgent. Sorry to leave you alone so soon!”

“No, it's alright,” she said with a smile, giving him a quick hug. “Have a good day.”

He returned the embrace, and grabbed his coat before heading out the door. Dejah watched him go, then peered out the window as he walked briskly down the street. When he was gone, she exhaled, and felt the tension begin to leave her body.

“I still love him,” she said to no one in particular, “but being here is driving me crazy.”

The pile of boxes and bags that still cluttered the living room caught her eye, and she picked up the tube that contained her maps and photographs.

As she twisted the end open, she paused. Then, with a burst of determination, she opened the tube and pulled out the images. She carried them into the workroom she had shared with Nathan two years earlier, and turned on the light.

She sighed as she saw that Nathan's sketches, blueprints, and designs had overflowed into her work space. Notes were stuck on the walls, and only a small space at the far end of her space was left free.

She pulled the designs and notes off of the wall, and set them in a neat stack on Nathan's desk, followed shortly by the papers that littered the floor of her space.

Dejah grabbed a box of thumbtacks from a drawer in her desk, and quickly began posting up the maps and images of the Phoenix and the northern plains of Mars. It's not the same as being there, she thought, but it's the only thing I've got right now.

A sudden idea struck her and she grabbed her comm. She punched out a quick message to Charles at the Mars Heritage museum, and a few moments later, the comm beeped. She answered it.

“Dej! Good to hear from you, I hope everything's going well in Spirit City?” Charles sounded good, she thought, even a little bit excited.

“Well, they're...” she shook her head and started over. “Yes, everything's fine here. I actually didn't expect you to call so soon.”

“I was just leaving the museum for the night,” he commented. “So what can I help you with?”

“You guys got the images from my helmet cam, right? I know Dandelion has them, too, but the red tape there would be incredible, and I thought this might be quicker.”

“Sure, we've got it. Some of our researchers having been going through the collection, analyzing and cataloguing it.”

“Can I get copies of those photos?” She held her breath as she waited for a response.

“I'll check, but there shouldn't be a problem with it. We're planning on putting the full image collection on the nets, as soon as it's all tagged and labelled, anyway. In fact, I bet I could even get you a little grant money, if you would just type up your memories of a few of the photos, just what your impressions of the landscape were, and we'll make it an exhibit at some point.”

“sounds fantastic! Do you have my net address to send them to?”

“Oh sure! I'll check around just to make sure that it's alright with the team here, and get those to you later this week. It may take me a few days to make sure I have it all.”

“that's fine,” she assured him, feeling a glimmer of excitement again. “Whenever you can get them to me is great, and I'll work on the writing.”

“that would be great! Sounds like a deal. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

She shook her head, looking around her workspace again. “No, that's more than enough, thanks again!” She turned the comm off, and looked around the workspace again, feeling more alive than she had in weeks.

“what're you working on, Dej?” Nathan asked as she stood by the printer; page after page of images of red dusty hills and jagged rocks filled the tray.

She grabbed the stack and moved it over to her side of the room, and began shuffling through them, arranging them into piles of similar images.

“Just something that I thought of the other day. It's too early to go back to Dandelion, I don't think I can get through a full day for another few weeks. I keep falling asleep in the middle of the day.” She paused, glancing quickly between two images and finally sorting them into different piles. “But if I don't have a project, I will go stir crazy.”

“Are those images from the Phoenix mission?”

“Uh huh,” she replied, not taking her eyes off of the pictures. Nathan waited for her to volunteer more information, but she went back to work, and he leaned against the doorway.

“So what's the goal of this project? It looks a little more complicated than most scrapbooks.”

“You'll see.” She hummed to herself as she sorted another handful of papers.

He watched for a little while, then sighed, and went back to work in the kitchen.

Dejah woke slowly from her nap. The couch was far too comfortbale, she decided sleepily, and sitting down on it after a solid morning's work was just asking for trouble.

She pushed back the blanket that she'd pulled over herself, and stretched. Nathan was at another construction site, and the house was quiet.

Dejah got to her feet, and pulled on her coat. The heating in the Dome had gotten better in the two weeks she had been gone, but it was still cold in the middle of the winter. She pulled on a pair of gloves, and locked the door as she left the house.

The streets were mostly quiet, since the majority of the residents were either at work or school in the middle of the day. The sun was bright, and Dejah wished she had thought to bring a pair of sunglasses.

A few minutes walking brought her to her destination. She smiled, seeing the familiar curving shape of the Dome wall. It always looked as if it was about to fall on you when you stood underneath it, she observed; maybe that was why so few people spent much time around the walls.

She reached out and touched the clear material with a gloved hand, and looked through the wall to the red landscape outside the Dome. The sunlight made the rocks and dust glow warmly, and the wind seemed to be just light enough to kick up the occasional spray of red dust. A beautiful day, she thought, too bad the weather's always the same in here.

She glanced around to see if anyone was coming, then lay down by the wall. She turned her face to the outside, looking across the flat ground. Every tiny feature was visible at this angle; small bumps and dips in the land revealed themselves, and the texture of the dust made the view look rough.

The chill from the ground was intense, and the wall itself was very cold to the touch. The heating systems tended to circulate the warmest air in the city centers; the wall itself conducted the chill through its material, and was difficult to heat.

Dejah scooped up a hand of dust and let it trickle through her fingers. It cascaded down, making a small pile below her hand. “I miss the wind,” she said quietly.

“Kind of a funny thing to miss,” said a voice behind her, “most people enjoy knowing that their hats are going to stay in place when they venture out.”

“Max!” she shouted, giving her friend a hug. He laughed, and hugged her back.

“Sorry I didn't have much time to visit when you first came back. I figured that you'd be too tired to enjoy much company. Feeling better now?”

She brushed the fine red dust from her coat and made a mental note to wash it when she got home. “Yes, much better, though I'm still taking naps every day. I'm due for a check up next week, and then they'll tell me when I can go back to work.”

“Great! I thought you'd probably be going stir crazy without something to work on.” He glanced outside, runnign his eyes along the ragged horizon. “Looking for something in particular out there? Or are you just trying to catch a cold so you don't have to go back to the office?”

She laughed again and shook her head. “No, I come here a lot. It's the nearest spot where I can get to the wall where there's no one around to watch. I miss being out there, you know.”

He nodded. “i think I know how you feel. I don't know what I'd do if they told me I couldn't fly anymore. There's nothing like it, getting up there in the black, looking down on a whole world. But come on, it's going to be getting dark soon, and you look cold. Mind if I come back to your house? I'd invite you over to mine, but I just got back from a trip, and Shelle has refused to allow me to show anyone the house before I've cleaned up my laundry and cargo.”

“It would be great to have you over, Max” she said, turning toward the town.

When they arrived at the house, Nathan was at home, and he greeted Max eagerly.

“Hey! I don't think I've seen you since you brought us home a few weeks ago.” The two men shook hands. Nathan said “Please, take a seat! I'll get dinner going. Have you been flying a lot lately?”

Max nodded, flinging himself into one of the armchairs in the living room. “Yeah, the more people come, the more demand there is for good pilots. I'm working on starting my own shipping company, for high priority items, or items that need guaranteed gentle handling. I know a couple of young hot shots who would be perfect to sign on for my crew. It looks like we'll be ready to start selling our services to the public in about a month.” he chuckled. “When I first started trying to set this thing up, I figured that insurance would be the trickiest hurdle. Nope, not by a long shot. Want to know what was?”

“Getting everyone to work for workable rates?” guessed Dejah, and Max shook his head.

“No, believe it or not, it was the advertising. I hired this agency out of Opportunity Dome. They've been driving me crazy for months now: they don't want to call it 'premium shipping,' because it sounds too pricey—which it is, but they don't want it to sound that way. Then they didn't want to use 'priority shipping' because it focused too much on speed and I'll also be offering shipping for high rick items and fragile items. I told them to just say 'Silver Hammer Shipping—for any damn thing you need to send,' but they just laughed at me.” He rolled his eyes dramatically, and Dejah laughed.

“Is Shelle excited about you finally getting to run your own company?” Nathan asked from the kitchen as he added yellow curry paste to a pan simmering on stove. Dejah sniffed the air appreciatively.

“Yeah, she is. I'll have a lot more control over my schedule, so hopefully I can be home a little bit more. Not so much in the beginning, when I pretty much have to take any shipping job I get, but once we're established, I can set up shipping centers with local pilots in all of the Domes, and spend a little more time working from here. I hate not seeing the kids grow up. I had to miss Brian's last birthday, and I just hated it. He understood, he's a good kid, but no parent wants to explain why they missed a birthday, right?”

“That sounds like it'll be a nice arrangement,” Dejah added wistfully. “you'll get to be home when you want to be, but still get out and see the planet every day.”

an awkward silence fell, and the only sound was the sizzle of the curry on the stove. Then Nathan glanced at Dejah, and asked Max, “So do you go to Bradbury Dome much? How's the museum doing?”

“Oh, it's a huge hit,” max said excitedly, shifting positions on the chair. “I wish I could have seen that crowd, I hear it's one of the biggest crowds that's been recorded here. Well over twenty thousand, and some reports said thirty. Incredible. Anyway, I actually stopped there long enough to take a quick trip through the museum the other day. There were still a lot of people coming and going, though they said they expect traffic to slow in the coming months. That Phoenix exhibit is really something to see. Actually, the whole museum is pretty nice in that regard. It's not just bare facts and data; they really try to make it feel like Mars, so even people who will never set foot on the bare surface get to experience a little of what it's like. I hope it makes people stop taking the place for granted.”

“Dinner's ready,” Nathan called from the kitchen as he lifted the top off a pot of rice, releasing a cloud of scented steam into the air. Max and Dejah joined him in the kitchen, and soon the table was set, and all three sat for the meal.

Dejah scooped a pile of rice onto her plate and covered it with the curry. “Nathan, I'm so glad you made this tonight. There was no place to get decent curry in Bradbury Dome, and I really really missed it. Especially on cold nights like this.”

“I would have made it sooner,” he admitted, “but I kept forgetting to get the stuff from the store. I'd remember it at three in the morning, and forget again the next day.”

She laughed.

After the dinner was over, the three worrked to clear the table and clean up the dishes. It only took a few minutes, then they moved to the living room and sat down, chatting about old times and Dejah told Max about visiting the University.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” max said with a sigh. “I still keep in touch with the Academy, and I usually try to get to some of the demonstrations. I've found some of my best pilots that way, and a lot of them are coming over to Silver Hammer Shipping. But it's so strange to see the changes that happen there, new instructors, new methods, new records to beat. Some punk Terran kid beat my record speed around the manuever course this year. Thought I'd have my name on that one for a lot longer than that.”

“Didn't you set about fifteen records?” Dejah asked with a grin, “surely not all of them have been beaten yet.”

“Only seven, as you well know, one of those actually being the record for number of records set by a single student. And yes, there's still at least two of them that stand. But I expect to see those go any day now.” He gave a dramatic sigh and pretended to be crushed. Dejah couldn't suppress a snort of derision, and Max grinned.

“No, really, it's fun, just a little strange. You remember those days, when everything seems like it's open to you, and you never think about things like paying bills, wiping noses, or trying not to strangle the fine people at your ad agency. But that's where everything ends up, really.”

“I wonder if that's what makes the difference between the people who make it in the end,” Nathan mused. “You remember Ann? I see her Areriums all over the place, all the best hotels and corporations want them worked into the designs for their lobbies. But then there was that kid Keith, you remember him Dej? Always got the top grades in any class he was in, everyone talked about how he was headed for the top, surely some big planning corp, maybe even a government liaison office. Last I heard, he went back to Terra, just never could seem to make it work here.”

Max nodded, then sighed and heaved himself to his feet. “And speaking of mundane duties that must be attended to, I should be on my way. Shelle's going to be putting the kids to bed in a few minutes, and I'd like to be home for that.”

Dejah hugged her friend, and walked with him to the door.

He opened the door to leave, then turned and looked at her for a minute. “I know you want to be back out there, Dej. It's pretty damn obvious to anyone who saw the way you look towards the Dome wall anytime you get close to it. And that's fine—it's people like you who opened up this world to us. But...” he glanced around the room, lit with warm globe lights and still decorated with pictures of the Aresian landscape. “Don't miss this. This is where life happens, this is the real deal. You've lived an incredible dream, but don't let it rob you of what you have here.” He gave her a quick hug, then turned and walked out into the night.

nano post 65

2009-11-30T08:25:00.002-08:00

When Nathan awoke the next morning, he turned to see Dejah's head resting on his shoulder. Her body was curled against his, knees digging into his side. He lay there for a little while, trying to get used to the feeling of sharing a bed again. Then he carefully got up, trying not to wake her and got dressed.

When Dejah awoke hours later, she found her muscles more stiff than they had been in months. It was the long flight, she decided. Twelve hours aboard a shuttle were enough to make anyone feel stiff. She stretched and pulled on a robe before heading into the living room.

Nathan was seated at the kitchen table, carefully placing several blocks on top of each other, then making notes in a notepad that rested on the table beside his hand. He was so intent on the model that he didn't see Dejah enter, and she watched him in silence for awhile.

The small building grew slowly, and Nathan's notes grew longer. Finally, he leaned back in the chair, exhaling, and caught sight of Dejah sitting on the couch, watching him.

“”Dej! I didn't hear you come in! Sorry, I didn't hear you come in. I didn't mean to ignore you.”

“No, it's alright, I enjoyed watching you.” She smiled. “It's been a long time since i've done that. I forgot how much I always enjoyed watching you work, you just throw everything you have into whatever it is that you're working on.”

“Well, I try,” he replied. “It's getting harder to get inspired now—my designs sell well, but nobody wants to let me keep some creative control. They just want to turn it all over to their construction crews, who of course make all kinds of changes and cut corners when they can.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to start complaining! I'm actually getting paid well so I have nothing to protest, really. Are you hungry? I don't know what I have in the pantry, but I could always run down to the store.”

She nodded. “you know, I hadn't thought about it, but yeah, I am pretty hungry. Weeks of hospital food, and food pouches before that...just not the same. And anything that's in the pantry is fine. I guess we'll need to go to the grocery store soon. It's going to be a little weird with two of us again.”

Nathan opened the pantry door and began pulling out cans of food. “Let's see, there's carrots, corn, sandwich mix, water chestnuts...why do I have water chestnuts, anyway? Um, looks like that's about it, except for a couple of really old cans of beans in the back.” he grinned sheepishly. “Like I said, living like a bachelor. I ended up eating out a lot. Spent a lot of time in Parsecs.”

“Can we go there? I forgot how much I missed it, there wasn't any place like it in Bradbury Dome, at least not that I ever found. Everything was too far away from Dandelion to get to during lunch, anyway. And I want to see Shelle—the kids are going to be so big by now! The youngest is almost two now, isn't he?”

Nathan looked slightly relieved. “That sounds like a good idea. We can stop by the store on the way home from lunch, and I know Shelle would be thrilled to see you. And yes, I think Pete is about two. He's a cutie, very much the charmer.”

Dejah quickly got dressed, and in a few minutes they were approaching the familiar restaurant. Dejah felt relieved that it had changed so little in the years since she had visited it.

Shelle was behind the counter, entering a bill into the register, and waved happily when she saw them come in. “Hey! Max said you'd gotten home safely, but I didn't expect to see you here so soon! I'll be over in just a minute.”

Nathan pointed out a booth near a sunny window, and they slid in. Dejah closed her eyes, feeling the warm sunlight on her face. “This feels nice, I've been inside too much lately.”

Shelle made her way over and gave Dejah a quick hug. “Wow, it's already been two years! The time goes so quickly, doesn't it? I watched all of the news stories when you came back from the pole, that was really something. Felt like watching the stories about the early colonists when I was a kid, you know? You got any plans for what you're going to do next? After something like that, you'd be able to take your pic of any number of jobs!”

Dejah shook her head. “No, not really. I'm going to have to be careful from now on, I'm afraid. This body got me out to the Phoenix and back, but it won't go that far again. I'll be working from this Dome from here on out, I think.”

“Oh damn,” Shelle muttered. “I'm sorry, Dej, I didn't know, Max didn't say anything. Well, no matter what, you've given us all something to look up to. That's a pretty big deal. Ah, I should stop babbling, you guys didn't come in to listen to me! Do you know what you want to eat?”

They gave her their orders, and she left to give them to the kitchen. Dejah slid her hand across the table, feeling the sunlight warm her skin.

“you feeling cold?” Nathan asked, watching her.

“No, I just miss having the sunlight. You know, even up there, where there were only a few hours of sunlight every day...It was incredible to be right out in it. I always feel like the Dome is filtering out too much of it.”

“Well, it has to filter some of it. The radiation is pretty intense. They may be able to one day increase the atmosphere here, get in some more oxygen and water, and ditch the Domes, but that's at least a hundred years away.”

She shrugged. “That would be a filter all its own, you know. It wouldn't be the red planet anymore. I like it the way it is.”

Nathan sat quietly, watching her as she looked out the window. Several transports went by, and once she saw a group of laughing University students on their way to the shops downtown.

She heard someone approach, and turned to see Shelle returning to the to table, holding a sturdy little boy by the hand. “Hey Dej, I hope you don't mind, but I really wanted Brian here to have a chance to say hello. He watched all of the news reports with me, and he's even got a little model of the Phoenix on his dresser at home. We're hoping to take him to the museum in a couple of months, he's been asking to see it ever since they showed the restored one on tv.”

She turned to the boy, and pointed to Dejah. “Do you recognize her, Brian?”

He nodded solemnly, and clung to his mother's side. “Yeah.”

“Well, aren't you going to say hello? She hasn't been here in a few years, but she's known you ever since you were a baby. She had to go get the Phoenix, but she's back now.”

The boy looked at Dejah with serious blue eyes, and said, “We talked about you at school. My teacher says that you're the last real explorer. Is that true?”

Dejah smiled slightly, and shook her head. “I hope not. We haven't explored all of Mars yet, and there's always things to be done. And in a few decades, people will start going to Europa, and that will be a whole new set of adventures.”

He thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “I think I'm gonna be an explorer too. 'Long as Daddy can come with me.”

the three adults laughed, and Shelle patted her son on the back. “Ok, sweetie, let's go ahead and let them have some time alone now, alright?” She herded him back toward the counter, mouthing a “thank you” to Dejah as she left.

“that's gotta be pretty inspiring,” Nathan commented, fiddling with a packet of imitation sugar that lay on the table. “you said you got a lot of letters from school kids. Were they all like that?”

Dejah shrugged. “More or less. Most of them probably aren't going to be interested in exploring in a year or two, it's just hot right now. Maybe a few of them will move to the colonies, or try to get a job at one of the companies that's still doing exploration. But the truth is...the truth is, there really isn't much that's left to be done. They'd have to have some kind off crazy drive inside them to go into the field at all, and most of them were raised to think of safety first.” She sighed, and turned back to the window. “They're going to have to be willing to risk it all, just on the chance of finding something. Not too many of those kinds of people left in the world, I'm afraid.”

Nathan laughed. “Except for you. And your team. It's people like you who inspire that spark of daring in people, that make a change.”

“Maybe a little bit. But it would have been better if I could have gone on with field work, even if it wasn't the big stuff. How are those kids going to react when they realize that I may not even be able to fly the Valkyrie again? You think they want to take that kind of risk?”

“you don't know that you won't be able to fly it. Sure, you won't be able to do the daredevil stuff you used to do. But you may be able to take it up again.”

Dejah was about to respond when Shelle brought their breakfast, and they began eating in silence.

“thanks for taking me here this morning,” Dejah said as the door to 12 Parsecs closed behind them. “I needed that little bit of familiarity, I think.” She glanced around the street. “I don't really want to go home, do you mind if I just wander around the town for a little while? I need to reorient myself.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “I've got a pretty flexible schedule for the next month or two, so I've got the morning free.”

She glanced down at the red dust before looking back at him. “I'm sorry, Nathan, but is it ok if I go alone? I need to figure out where I fit in here, and I need to do that by myself.”

Taken slightly aback, he hesitatingly agreed. “Oh...alright. Just don't let yourself get too tired, ok? Call a transport if you need it, and I'm only a quick comm away.”

She nodded, and kissed his cheek. “Thanks. I'll be home later.”

She turned and walked down the street, taking in the new storefronts that had opened. The streets seemed more crowded, and once or twice she saw young families going about their business.

Marcus' shop was open, but Dejah decided against going in. Too much, she thought, too soon. Some other day.

She wandered for an hour, making her way slowly through the parts of the town that she had once known like the back of her hand. Without realizing it, she had made her way back to the University campus, and paused at the sight of the familiar arched entry.

On a whim, she turned to the right and passed under the arch. The campus looked as it always had, she thought, with a momentary feeling of elation. There was the four dorms, and the central plaza, with the Spirit memorial in the middle of it. Students were walking along the paths, some on their way to class, others headed for a meal, and others, she assumed, just enjoying the sunshine.

She passed between the Wells and Holst dorms, and came out into the central lawn, and made her way toward the center and the memorial there.

There were a few students perched on the low wall around the plaza, but they seemed to be ignoring her, lost in their studies or other projects, and she walked up to the high pedestal that held the Spirit. She laid her hand on the concrete pillar, and looked up at the rover.

“Hey, friend,” she whispered. “Remember me? Been a while, hasn't it.”

the concrete was slightly warm to her touch, and leaned against it for a minute, feeling the warmth seep into her body. “Phoenix is back, now. She's in the museum in Bradbury Dome, and she's been restored, too. She was in pretty bad shape, but they got her put back together pretty well.”

She felt the weight of the pendant against her chest and grinned. “Well, mostly put together. Apparently, there is one missing piece of a solar panel that had to be reconstructed.” She pulled out the chain, and ran a finger around the edge of the fragment of solar panel, feeling it warm in the sunlight.

“Hey, are you ok?” she heard the voice behind her and quickly turned around to see a student with a concerned look on his face. “I saw you slumped up against the thing here and I thought you might be sick or...” his eyes widened as he suddenly recognized her. “Oh gods, I'm so sorry, I didn't recognize you!”

She shook her head. “No, it's alright, I didn't stop to think about how it might look. I used to spend a lot of time here when I was a student. Sometimes at night when no one was looking, I'm climb up and sit next to Spirit and talk to her. She's a pretty good listener.”

“You know, you're a real hero around here these days,” the student commented. “It's the biggest thing a University of Mars grad has done in years.”

“Well, it's a good school,” she commented, looking around the campus again. “I really enjoyed my years here.”

the young man looked slightly embarassed as he dug a textbook out of the bag slung over his shoulder. “Listen, I'm sure you're busy and I feel kinda silly asking this, but...would you sign my geology book?”

Dejah looked at him for a moment, then broke into a laugh. “Of course! Excuse my laughter, I don't mean to make fun of you, it just struck me as funny.” The young man handed her a pen and she quickly scrawled her name on the front page of the book. “Hey, what's your name?”

“Um, Jared.”

She wrote under the signature, “Always look forward, Jared. Adventure is just over the horizon.” closing the book, she handed it back to him.

“Thank you so much!” he stammered, carefulyl stowing the book back in the bag. “Wow, I didn't even know you lived in Spirit City.”

“Just got back yesterday, actually—I lived in Bradbury Dome for two years while we put the mission together.” She stuck out a hand and said, “Well, Jared, I have to get going, I want to see the rest of the campus before it gets dark. But it was very good to meet you.”

He shook her hand eagerly. “I still can't believe I got to meet you. Thanks!”

she smiled, and made her way across the main lawn to the Robinson lecture hall. As Dejah walked up the steps to the familiar building, she could hear the sounds of a class in session. She took the back stairway up to the balcony where she had often watched the new students being welcomed to the school.
She leaned against the wall to stay out of sight as much as possible, and peeked out into the auditorium. Doctor Livingstone was addressing a group of students; it looked like a regular class, but it was impossible to tell what the class subject was. Dejah grinned, remembering the many “big picture” lectures she had sat in during her student days.

“It's not enough for us to convince people to move to Mars, to start a new life here, if we don't have any way of making that new life better. Mars isn't Terra, and we have no desire to be like Terra, but with the influx of new colonists every year, we'll be inundated if we don't keep creating our own culture. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking that only scientists or builders are the creators out here. Anyone can add to the culture, and all of you should. Leave behind the consumer culture that you, most of you anyway, were raised in. Learn to become producers again, make things, help us grow into the brave new world that we know this can be.”

the class dismissed shortly afterward, and Dejah made her way down the stairs. As usual, there was a small knot of very earnest students surrounding Doctor Livingstone, asking about the lecture and the ideas he had been explaining. He was sitting on the edge of the stage, deep in the conversation, and making sweeping gestures, trying to communicate the passion she knew he had for the red planet.

He caught a glimpse of her, and waved her over. With a smile, she approached and joined the group.

“Ms. Sorenson! I had no idea you were back! I heard that you were going to be staying in Bradbury Dome as a consultant to the museum!”

She shook her head. “No, they asked, but I turned them down. Museum work really isn't my forte, and I'm really not much of one for honorary positions.”

He looked around at the group of students, who had suddenly fallen silent, surprised at the addition to the conversation. “I'm sure you all recognize Ms. Sorenson from the vids that have come out of Bradbury Dome in the last few months. She is, of course, a graduate of this university, and is one of the best examples of what I was talking about today. In her freshman year, she designed and flew the Valkyrie. I can see that some of you are familiar with it. Most of the gliders in use on Mars today are based on that original design. Then after graduation, she went to work for Dandelion Corporation, and fought to present her proposal for recovering the Phoenix. Of course, you all know her recent adventures. This is exactly the sort of person that we expect to come from this school.”

Dejah felt her elation slowly slipping away, replaced by a sinking feeling. For a few minutes, it had almost felt like she was a student again, as if the whole world was out there for the taking. But she'd taken her bit of it, and her part was over now. She ran her eyes over the remaining students, feeling a twinge of envy at the eager expressions on their faces. They could still do anything, be anything, discover anything.

“really,” she protested as soon as Doctor Livingstone paused, “don't listen to him, he always exaggerates things. Lots of University grads have gone on to do extraordinary things. Just keep working at it, you'll make your mark in time, too.”

Chattering excitedly, the students finally made their way out of the auditorium, and Dejah leaned against the edge of the stage. “It really is good to see you again, Ms. Sorenson,” Livingstone repeated. “I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable there, but it really is an exciting thing to see what you've done.”

She nodded, trying to swallow the lump that had formed in her throat. “Yeah, I get that. The problem is...it's something that is done.” She emphasized the last word, and Livingstone nodded in recognition.

“Facing that moment when you realize that your biggest accomplishment is behind you now?”

She nodded.

“We all come to that point, you know. Or die before it happens, but that's fairly rare. Are you familiar with A. E. Housman, the Terran poet? No? Ah, that's a shame, he's written some truly lovely things. One of his more famous pieces is called 'To an Athelete Dying Young.'”

He cleared his throat, and quoted:

“Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

“Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

“Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.”

the word died into silence in the large space, and neither of them broke the quiet for several minutes. Then Livingstone spoke again, “It's hard to hear that, you know that. And most of us, unless we die in the middle of our victory, have to face that moment when the record is cut and our names begin to die. You're facing that now, or at least, you're facing the emotion of it. It'll be years before that trek of yours is surpassed, but the news is already moving on to other stories. In a few years, you'll be able to wander around town and not have anyone recognize your face. But if I know you, that's not what bothers you the most, though you're certainly not happy about it.”

“I miss the excitement,” Dejah said quietly. “I really felt alive out there, you know? Just me and Mars, the dust and the wind, the ice...Things were very simple, and even when I thought I wasn't going to make it, I loved every second of it. Now because I lived it once, I can never live it again. Now I get to sit and watch others go out there, and most of them don't even appreciate it. They complain about the dust and the ice, and try to hurry back to the safe little Domes.”

“I thought it might be something like that. Believe it or not, I often feel the same way.” He glanced toward her, and laughed at her confused expression. “no, I do, I do! I loved being a student back on Earth. My teacher was a fantastic scholar, and I've never met anyone who pursued the truth more doggedly than he did. He was always open to changing his mind if anyone could show that he was wrong. Everything was like a book to him, every tree, story, and person. It was because of him that I started the University here. And of course, I'm well known now for having done so, but other schools will come. Some are already here, though their missions are a little different from ours. And because I have to be the main 'in charge' person here, I don't get to just sit and have discussions like I used to be able to. More people get to learn now, and that's a very good thing, but it was an exchange that still pains me sometimes.”

Dejah listened, deep in thought. “Was it worth it?”

Livingstone nodded. “Yes, very much so. I'd make the same choices again if I had to. There's a very special kind of joy that I get, watching my students pass me, go beyond anything that I could ever do. But it feels a little bit like what death must feel like, I think.”

nano post 64

2009-11-30T08:25:00.001-08:00

the remaining weeks passed slowly as Dejah began to heal, but they did pass. Sooner that she had thought, it was time to board a shuttle to Spirit City. Max had offered the use of the Silver Hammer again, and she had gratefully accepted.

Dejah and Nathan walked up the steps to Dejah's apartment, and Deah slid her card into the door lock. It clicked, and she pushed the door open. Though the small room was clean and tidy, it had the unmistakable air of a place that had not been lived in in some time. Two, almost three months now, Dejah thought with a sadness that she couldn't quite place.

“there shouldn't be too much to pack,” she said to Nathan, as he brought up some folded boxes to pack everything in. “Let's see, I think everything in the kitchen is stuff that came with the place, so we don't have to worry about that. I'll need the stuff in my closet, the thick blankets on the bed—don't worry about the sheets and the coverlet, those came with the place—and then there's the maps and stuff...” Her voice trailed off.

“We can take the maps, Dej,” Nathan said quietly. “you may want them later for memories.”

“I know. Let's go ahead and take them. It just seems so strange to be packing them away for good now. I mean, it's not like I'm ever going to really use them again, except maybe to look at them and remember.” She shrugged. “Oh well. Anyhow, anything here in the main room that's not furniture needs to go. A couple of loads for each of us should do it.”

He nodded, and began packing clothes into the boxes, wrapping them around more fragile items to protect them.

Dejah began unpinning her maps and satellite images from the walls. She'd taken to bringing copies of her maps and research images home, and studying them in the evenings, trying to memorize the surface of Mars before she ever set foot on the road to retrieve the Phoenix. Of course, all of her preparation had not prepared her for the reality of the Aresian surface, for being so close to Mars itself. The pictures seemed almost like paintings, she thought, paintings from someone who had read a lot about the red planet, had even studied the vids and images, but had never actually been there. She sighed, and rolled up the maps, carefully storing them in a cardboard tube she'd brought along for the purpose.

In a few minutes, her belongings were packed into the boxes and stacked by the door, ready to be carried down the steps and loaded into the waiting transport. The room looked barren, devoid of any personality she had brought to it, as if her presence could be wiped away with the loss of a few material things.

Nathan came back into the small room, having deposited one load of boxes into the transport, and picked up another. Dejah grabbed a box, and followed him.

As the last box was loaded, Dejah asked, “We still have time to stop by the Dandelion warehouse and say goodbye, right?”

“Of course,” he replied. “I enjoyed talking to your coworkers when they came to visit you in the hospital, I'd like to say thanks to them again myself.”

They were silent during the short drive, Dejah lost in thought. Soon the warehouse came into view, looking as it always had, and for a moment, it felt as though she had never left.

As Nathan pulled the transport to a stop and parked it, Dejah opened her door and got out, looking up at the large open doors, half expecting to see one of the giant rigs come rolling out.

Instead, the usual noises of clanging tools, rover motors, and Eduardo's radio reached her ears. She couldn't help smiling at the familiar sound, and stepped into the shadowed building.

She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, and before she could regain her full vision, she found herself swept off of her feet in a bear hug.

“Sorenson!” she heard Eduardo shout as he spun her around. “You have no idea how good it is to see you up and about again!”

He set her down, and gave her shoulders a final squeeze before stepping back. His shout had caught the attention of Oliver Thomas and Kruiser, and the two men ran towards the small group.

For a moment, Dejah was lost in a storm of hugs, back slaps, and congratulations, before her colleagues moved back and gave her a bit of air. She came up grinning and laughing, feeling more at home than she had for weeks.

“What, you didn't really think i'd leave before coming by to say goodbye, did you?”She hiccoughed slightly, feeling caught between laughing and crying.

Thomas grinned, standing at the edge of the group. “You belong here, Dej, not in that hospital.”

“Hell yeah!” she answered, reaching up to give him a hug. “Couldn't have done it without you, Thomas. Always good to hear a calm voice on the other end of the comm.”

“What, like I'm not calm?” Eduardo protested.

“Eduardo, the only bigger drama queen in this warehouse is Kruiser when someone brings in a mistreated machine.” She slapped him on the back.

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” the mechanic grinned, brandishing a wrench. “Don't let me hear about you doing anything stupid out there, alright? You've given me enough heart attacks for one life.”

“Don't Worry, Kruiser, I don't think this body would let me get away with anything crazy anymore. I'll be lucky to get back on the surface at all, I think the home office plans to keep me pretty much under the Dome.” She grimaced.

“Like hell they will,” Eduardo said. “No one has everr figured out a way to keep you out of that red dust, Sorenson, and I don't think those white collar boys at the Spirit City office will be the ones to do it.”

Dejah forced a smile, feeling her high spirits slip away. There will be other missions for them, she thought, feeling an ache in her throat. There will other missions for them, but not for me.

An awkward moment of silence fell on the group, and Dejah knew she needed to go. The transport was waiting.

“Well...” She cleared her throat, and turned to Eduardo. “I guess this is it, then. It was a genuine honor to work with you, even if your taste in music is totally screwed up.”

He laughed, and shook her proferred hand. “Likewise, I assure you. Just wait, that style is gonna come back, and then you're going to feel like a real idiot.”

“Not likely” she smirked. “Feel free to comm me any time, let me know about all the crazy exciting things happening here in Bradbury, alright?”

he nodded, and she turned her attention to Thomas. “well, Mr. Thomas, I am going to miss you. You take good care of these two weirdos, alright?” She hugged him one last time, and whispered, “I hope you find your way back to a blue planet. I'll never understand why you'd want a world like that, but I hope you find it.”

He laughed, and returned the hug. “Enjoy your red planet, Dejah Sorenson. Don't ever let anyone take that love away from you.”

She smiled and pulled away; looking over her shoulder, she saw Kruiser standing a few meters away, and grinned. “Oh n, mister, you're not getting away from this without a hug!”

He let out a groan of protest, but patted her back gently as she squeezed his shoulders.

“You kept me alive there at the end, Kruiser. Who knew that being such a loudmouth would be crucial in the end?”

He laughed. “yeah, well, don't count on it happening again. Now get on out of here before the big shots here talk you into becoming a permanent display in that museum.”

She began walking toward the door, where Nathan stood, waiting. Eduardo called out, “Damn! Hang on a sec, Dej, we forgot something,”

Dejah turned around expectantly. Eduardo dug into the pocket of his coveralls and pulled out an irregularly shaped pendant on a thin chain.

“Thomas and I got this out of the frost up there, and Kruiser figured out how to get it on the chain.” He blushed, suddenly self conscious.

Dejah took the chain, and turned the pendant over in her hand. It had had sharp edges, but a precise grinding job had softened them slightly, and the whole thing appeared to be coated in some sort of sealant. It was some sort of manmade material, but it didn't look like any sort of synthetic jewelry she had seen. A delicate soldering job held it to a small ring that slipped onto the chain.

Eduardo cleared his throat, and grinned uneasily. “See, we figured that with everything you went through, you should be able to carry a little bit of the Phoenix with you. Well, those solar panels were in pretty bad shape, you know, all splintered and broken, there was no way we could be expected to recover every single piece.”

“you stole this from the site during the recovery? Isn't that a felony?”

He shrugged, and stuck his hands into his coverall pockets, grinning.

“You three are absolutely incorrigible,” she laughed, fastening the chain around her neck. “and I wouldn't have it any other way.”

“Now get the hell out of here,” Thomas laughed, “before you make these two tough guys all teary eyed again.”

She waved from the door of the building, and stepped out into the sunlight. The pendant warmed almost instantly.

Dejah fell asleep on the flight back to Spirit City, and woke to find Max and Nathan talking. Neither had noticed that she was awake, and she sat quietly, listening.

“I just don't think I've seen her like this before,” Max was saying, his eyes fixed on the instrument panel. “I've seen her discouraged, tired, and angry, but I don't think I've ever seen her without that fight, that fire. It's like she's not even there, you know?”

“I know,” Nathan said. “I think she thinks that everything is over, that the big thing has been done and there's nothing to fight for anymore. She knows that she'll never have another big mission—her body simply won't take it. She's almost resigned to living in a Dome the rest of her life, watching other people go out and have the adventures. It's what she always dreaded, what she was afraid of...but I don't think anyone expected it to happen because she won her fight.”

“It scares me to see that. I'm so used to seeing that fire inside of her, and it just seems like a pile of ashes now.”

“Yeah, me too. But we've been so distant for so long, I don't even know how to help her. Hell, we haven't been in the same city for two years, and things weren't going well even before that.”

There was silence for a little while, but just as Dejah was drifting back into sleep, Max commented, “the Dejah I know wouldn't really be looking for help. She's always hated feeling like she wasn't up to anything that life threw her way.”

“Maybe that's part of the problem. What can I give her, Max? She doesn't want anything from me. I told her once that she loved the damn planet more than she loved me. I said it to hurt her, but I think it's probably true. Maybe getting married was a mistake for us.”

“Maybe you should ask what it is that she needs that Mars gives her.”

It was dark when the ship came in to land in Spirit City. Dejah had been awake for the last few hours of the trip, asking Max and Nathan about things that had changed in the town while she had been away.

“It's become the fastest growing city on Mars,” Max informed her. “A lot of the University students have stayed in the city, and they're having families, and those families need schools,grocery stores, clothing shops...you name it! It's not nearly as civilian oriented as Opportunity City, but it's a lot more so than when you left.”

“You'll have to go see Dr. Livingstone sometime soon,” Nathan added. “I saw him at the last graduation, and he was so proud of you that he could hardly talk. He's already talking about how you are the model of what University graduates are supposed to be.”

The Hammer slowed on the runway, and slowly came to a halt. “Alright folks, this is the end of the line tonight. It's late but there's probably still a transport or two for hire that could get your stuff over to the house for you.”

As Dejah stepped onto the cracked concrete of the runway, she smelled the familiar scents of fuel and oil that marked every runway and launch pad in the solar system. She looked up, and saw the night sky through the dome.

“The stars look so much farther away here,” she whispered. There were more street lights than she remembered, and the city hummed with traffic though it was nearly ten o'clock.

Nathan signaled a transport and loaded the boxes and bags onto its flat bed, tying them down with elastic ropes. When everything was secure, he called to Dejah, and the two of them got into the back seats of then transport, and the driver pulled slowly out of the spaceport.

Dejah pressed her face against the window, watching the streets go by. There were more trees than she remembered, and more shops.

“It's going to take me a while to figure out my way around town again,” she commented. “Looks like all of the old landmarks have changed.”

“You'll get the hang of it in no time,” Nathan reassured her. “Most of the places you knew are still here, the areas surrounding them just look a little different.”

The transport pulled up in front of the house, and Nathan and the transport driver quickly took the boxes and bags into the house. Dejah waited until they were done, then made her way inside while Nathan settled the bill.

The house was dark, except for the single hall light that had been turned on so that they could see to unload the boxes. The building was cold, and dust had settled on everything, a thin red film that made everything look older than it was.

There were discarded sketches tossed all over the floor of the living room, and an array of modeling bricks covered the kitchen table.

“sorry about the mess,” Nathan said quietly, joining her. “I left in a bit of a hurry, and I was kind of living like a bachelor before that. I'll get it cleaned up tomorrow, I promise.”

“It's alright,” Dejah replied. “It actually makes it look a little more familiar.”

“Well, I'll still take care of it in the morning. But you're probably really tired, let's get you into bed so you can sleep.”

He put an arm around her waist to support her as they walked back to the bedroom. Dejah kicked off her shoes and socks, and slipped into her pajamas. Nathan helped her into the bed, then stood back.

“Dej...I hate to ask this, especially now, when I know you're tired, but...well, if you want me to sleep on the couch for awhile, until we're used to being together again, it's ok.”

She shook her head. “No, come on into bed, you're tired, too.”

“Are you sure? It's not a problem, I figured that there would have to be some things that we'd need to get used to again.”

Dejah rested her head on the pillow, and turned onto her side. “Come on, Nathan. Just get in.”

nano post 63

2009-11-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Dejah thought she was dreaming. Darkness had given way to a dim mauve light, and there was a loud roaring sound overhead. She blinked, and through blurry eyes, saw several forms floating on the wind, moving through the thin atmosphere. The loud roar had passed by, but a smaller rushing sound brushed by her ears.

“There aren't any birds on Mars,” she said thickly, not understanding.

Then the first of the forms swept in close to the ground, and she saw two legs come down and land, pulling the shape to a stop. The figure shed its wings, and ran over to where she lay against the lander. A glider, she realized suddenly, it's a glider.

The figure bent over her, and through a faint haze she could see the bronzed face of Eduardo.

“We're here, Dej. We're going to take you home.”

“gliders...” she whispered, “gliders...no updrafts here...”

He grinned, and beckoned to another suited figure, and they carefully picked her up.

“You can thank Kruiser for that one. The shuttle can't land here, and we needed a way to get you aboard, so he figured out how to attach an engine to a glider. Now, for once in your life, shut up and let us help you.”

She closed her eyes again, and felt nothing when the glider took off.

Dejah drifted, not knowing where she was, but not particularly caring. All she knew was that she was warm, and comfortable, and she hadn't been either in a long time.

Slowly, she came back toward consciousness. She felt herself lying on a soft surface, and tried to move her arms, but found herself too weak.

She forced her eyes open. It was a small room, painted a warm ecru shade, with a window that was letting in sunlight.

Dejah could tell very little else about the room; her vision was blurry, and she felt as though she would fall back asleep at any moment. But the room gradually swam into focus, and she saw that she was lying on a bed with a plain blue blanket. There were two chairs in the room, but only one was occupied. She couldn't tell who was sitting in the chair—he was slumped forward, head propped on his arm, and his face covered by his elbow.

Darkness came again, and she drifted away, dreaming quietly of red dust and winged machines.

It was two more days of occasional waking before she was able to stay conscious for more than five minutes at a time.

Waking again, she felt fully present in the white room for the first time, more awake than she had been before. She moved her fingers across the bedspread, feeling the slightly rough texture of the fabric. Her arms ached, and she stopped trying to move.

But the slight motion had attracted the attention of the man who had been sitting in the chair every time she had awakened, though she had never seen him leave the chair during her few alert moments the preceeding days.

He knelt by the bed, and took her hand. She slowly focused her eyes on his face.

“Nathan,” she croaked, her throat dry and sticky.

“Shhh, Dej, don't try to talk yet. The doctor was surprised you had even been waking up so soon. I guess you can't stand to stay still, even after all of that.” He smiled, and she could see tears dripping off of his chin.

She swallowed, and spoke again, more easily this time. “I thought you were in Spirit City.”

He laughed, rubbing his thumb along her hand. “You really think I'd stay there when they told me what had happened, that you'd set out across the plains with no tent? As soon as I heard that, I called Max. He had heard the news too, and was getting ready to head off to Bradbury Dome, and was more than happy to take me along. I got here in time to see the rescue crew off, but they wouldn't let me stay in the warehouse. Finally got chased out by some crazy mechanic. I wanted to talk to you over the comm, but they said that you were focused, and that distracting you could break that focus, and you might not have enough strength to hang on until they got there.” He smiled, and kissed her fingers. “I knew that was crazy, that nothing I could say would break that iron will of yours, but it didn't matter.”

“glad you're here now,” she whispered, holding his hand to her cheek as she fell asleep again.

“Well, the long and short of it is that you just pushed yourself too hard,” the doctor explained. Dejah was finally able to sit up again, and Nathan sat beside her on the bed.

“First off, the mission even as planned was pretty intense, and we would have insisted on a full checkup when you came back. Then you spent several days on the rover, traveling between twelve and fourteen hours a day, which is dangerous and pretty exhausting. Your health records indicate that you weren't sleeping well during your trip, and that didn't allow your body to recover or refresh itself. Then the rover failed, and you, Ms. Sorenson, did an incredibly stupid thing, and struck out on your own. The hab tent protected you from the environment at night, but that suit wasn't meant for fourteen hour days for weeks on end; it's a miracle you didn't rip it or get a pinhole leak. But it was those last three days that really did the damage. You didn't sleep or eat for nearly seventy two hours, during which time you traveled over twenty kilometers on foot, through temperatures that the suit was not equipped to deal with. You were already dangerously tired, and your body was under nourished for that kind of exertion. But then you developed hypothermia, in part because your body had nothing to burn for fuel but itself. How you managed to stay awake for so long, I'm not sure, but it's damned impressive.” He examined his clipboard for a moment, then continued.

“The long and short of it is that you have sustained some damage. You may not be able to recover the full strength and flexibility you had at one time, but given your good health before the trip, you should be able to continue in your job, with more low key missions. No more long term missions, I think.” He smiled. “Of course, you've made quite a mark with this mission: any more like that, and it might just seem like a death wish.”

Dejah tried to smile, but didn't quite manage it.

“Anyway, I'm going to recommend that you take a leave of absence from your job. Your employers have been asking after you quite a bit, it seems that they are eager to have a press conference to show the world that you are alive and well. I can give you doctor's orders to refuse them as long as you need to. Two weeks further bed rest, then we'll start with some basic physical therapy. I'd recommend three months leave before going back to work, and six before going back to the field. You should be able to leave for your home in Spirit City once the two weeks of bed rest are up, and I'll send your files to the hospital there.”

He left the room, and Nathan lay down on the bed beside Dejah.

She leaned back against the pillows, and asked, “Nathan, have they brought the Phoenix back yet? Did they send the team?”

He nodded. “Yeah, though they said it was just about the last day they could have gone before the cold got too bad. I talked to Eduardo, and he said they never would have found it from the air without that gps unit you attached to it. The Mars Heritage Museum is already working on restoring it, and they'll be opening the museum in about two weeks. They want you to give a speech at the opening. I asked the doctor, and he said you can if you want, but he'd ask you to be in a wheelchair for it.”

“I don't want anyone to see me in a wheelchair,” she responded. “I don't want their pity, I want their respect.”

Nathan sighed, and moved closer to her; even now, he thought, as tired as she is, and she still feels tense and stiff.

“Dej...do you mind if I ask you something?”

“What?” she whispered, tracing the delicate lines on his palm with a finger.

“After everything you went through, and everything that you're still going to face, everything the doctor said...was it worth it?”

She was silent for a long time, and he began to wonder if she had fallen asleep, when she finally responded, “Yes. I think so. I'd do it again, if I had to.”

The weeks in the hospital passed slowly. Dejah found herself irritated by her body's need to rest, and the slowness of the recovery process.

The day before the Mars Heritage museum opening, one of the nurses brought her a wheel chair. “Please, Ms. Sorenson. Everyone wants to see the woman who brought back the Phoenix. No one pities you. We all just want to thank you.”

Reluctantly, Dejah allowed herself to be shown how to use the chair, and found that she was glad to have the ability to move around the building by herself.

The morning of the museum opening, Dejah asked Nathan to take her to the museum an hour early. He rented a personal transport, and strapped her wheelchair to the back of it. He carried Dejah from her room to the transport, and carefully settled her in the passenger seat before snapping her seat belt into place.

As he closed the door to go and check the wheel chair mounts, Dejah turned on her wrist comm, and called Charles Stroupe at the museum.

“Scout Sorenson!” he exclaimed when he picked up the call. “I hear that you've accepted our request to be our guest of honor at the opening ceremonies today. I hope you're not going against your doctor's orders or anything, but I have to say that I was thrilled to hear it!”

“Don't worry, the doctor says it's fine, I just have to be careful.” She tried to keep the bitter tone out of her voice. “I have a request, if you don't mind. I'm on my way up there now, and I was wondering if I could get a few minutes alone with the Phoenix before everything gets crazy.”

“Absolutely! I'll talk to security and have them get it all set up.”

“Ok, will they have my name on a list, or do I need to check with someone when I get there?”

He laughed. “Ms. Sorenson, yours is one of the most famous faces on Mars right now, and the most popular face at Mars Heritage. Just show up.”

Nathan pushed Dejah's chair into the room where the Phoenix was displayed, the room Dejah had visited on her previous trip to the Museum. The Lander was proudly displayed on top of the mound of dust, silhouetted against the changing sky.

“thanks,” she whispered to Nathan, squeezing his hand briefly. “Is it ok if I'm alone in here for a few minutes?”

“Of course,” he responded, and kissed her forehead before walking back into the hallway.

Dejah rolled her chair as close to the lander as she could, and looked at it for a long time.

“Well, one of us is looking a lot better than the last time we met,” she said, with a hint of a smile. “I'd come up there to say hi, but I'm trying to save my strength. There's something I have to do later, and I need to make sure that i'll be able to do it.”

She leaned back in the chair and examined the Phoenix in its new home. “I'm not sure if I like this better than where I found you. This is...incredible. Beautiful. It looks the way I've always pictured it. But there's no carbon frost, no wind, no...” she thought for a moment. “there's no Mars here.”

the lander stood silently, and she continued. “I guess this is alright. It really is lovely, and I'm sure you're better off being out of those conditions. Hell, we're both pretty well grounded now.” She gestured to the chair. “No more high flying for either of us old birds, huh? But at least we'll always remember. We'll always remember what it was like to fly.”

She reached down, and let some of the dust from the ground drift through her fingertips. “It's all ashes now, of course. But at least we can remember.'

The ceremonies opened outside, with the guests of honor and presenters seated in a row of chairs along the top of the wide staircase. Dejah looked out over the crowd, wondering how many there were. Surely there were more people here than lived in Bradbury Dome—where had they all come from?

There was a small podium just in front of the Viking 2 memorial, with a microphone and a small ramp that Dejah assumed had been added for her. She shifted uncomfortably in her wheelchair, and watched as a young man took the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to celebrate with us today! My name, as most of you know, is Ares Atkinson, and I am very honored to be standing before you today. In a few moments, the museum, the first museum on Mars, will be open, and we can hardly wait to show it to you. But before we open the museum, there is someone I would like to introduce you to.”

He cleared his throat, and continued. “It had been said that Mars had become safe, not much different than the lunar colonies, or Terra itself. Now, no true Aresian likes to hear that kind of talk, but it was a little difficult to deny these claims. After all, most of us now live in domed cities, able to walk about with little thought of our breathing, something that our predecessors had to be constantly mindful of. Even our greatest exploration companies had settled into doing mostly geological work, and it was said that the golden age of adventure on Mars was over.”

He paused, and the crowd was silent, waiting to hear the denial of these claims.

“Well, a few weeks ago, it was conclusively demonstrated that the spirit of adventure, that burning flame of desire for new knowledge, new sights, new horizons—this spirit was still alive and well in the heart of Aresians! Because one young woman not only took it upon herself to prepare and lead a mission to recover the last Terran probe that lay out on the frozen sands, but refused to turn back, even when everything told her that she should. She left her rigs and crew when they were stalled by a storm, abandoned her own rover when it refused to run, and finally destroyed her own hab tent when it held her back, arriving at the site of the Phoenix Lander with nothing more than a basic survival pack and her exploration suit!”

As he spoke, the crowd began to applaud, and then to cheer; by the time he paused for breath, the audience was in an uproar, shouting and waving at the stage.

“I tell you today that the spirit of adventure, of courage and sheer stubborness that landed us here on these red hills so many years ago—it has not left us, and as long as we have these shining examples before it, it never will! I give you, Dandelion Corporation Scout Dejah Sorenson, the woman who brought the Phoenix home!”

The applause was deafening; it echoed off the stone of the museum, and seemed to bounce off the distant roof of the Dome as well.

Dejah looked at Nathan, seated beside her, and gave a slight, almost secretive smile. Then she grabbed the arm rests of the chair, and pushed herself upward. As she stood, Nathan tried to grab her hand, but she shook her head. “I need to do it this way,” she whispered. Her steps were hesitant, but in a few moments, she was standing at the podium, clutching the sides for support. A sweat broke out on her forehead, but she held her head high.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid that I do not have the Atkinson way with words. I don't have anything fancy to say. But ever since I first set out to bring back the Phoenix, and especially after I came back, it seems like everyone wants to know, why? Why bring back the Phoenix? Why go to such lengths for a bit of history that's as much Terran as Aresian.”

She paused, and looked over the crowd. There have to be at least twenty thousand people here, she thought.

“You know, when I found the Phoenix, it was almost a disappointment. Even though I'd been through hundreds of scenarios, training for how to recover the Phoenix in any state of collapse, I didn't really expect it to look like that. I thought of myself striding confidently over the red dust hills during a purple sunset, and coming across the lander, still standing tall, the way it looks in all of the pictures that we see. Of course, it wasn't like that. It was the middle of the night, I was almost delirious with cold and exhaustion, and the Phoenix didn't look much better than I did. It was hard to take at first, that shock of reality. But in the end, I decided something. I liked it better that way. The Phoenix was broken down because she was really out there on Mars, experiencing the full force of this beautiful deadly world. She was broken because we, the human race, had dared to send her to do something amazing, and that was a beautiful thing in its own right.”

Dejah cleared her throat, and felt her knees beginning to go weak. She spoke a little faster.

“So when you go into the museum today, enjoy it. Appreciate it. Understand the effort it took to get us here. When you see the Phoenix standing tall in there, remember two things: reality requires being broken, and some things are always worth doing, even if you are torn apart in the process. Remember the Phoenix, and live like a true Aresian. Thank you.”

She almost fell backwards into the chair, and felt like she might fall asleep right there, but the slow crescendo of applause reached the stage, and she heard her name being shouted over and over again.

Ares Atkinson took the podium and spoke again, but Dejah didn't hear most of it, just enough to understand that he was extending thanks to the other corporations, scientists, and donors who had made the museum possible. Soon, a large red ribbon over the doors of the museum was cut, and the crowd began to file inside.

Nathan leaned over to Dejah as the rest of the honored guests were ushered out of their seats, and into the front of the museum line. “Do you want to fight the crowds? You seem pretty tired.”

She shook her head. “No, I think that was just about all that I've got left in me. Let's just go back to the hospital.”

nano post 62

2009-11-30T08:22:00.000-08:00

The night was long, and the hours blended together, marked only by the silent gradual movement of the stars across the sky. Dejah saw a few satellites blink their way across the field of stars, and once a dust devil whirled into brief existence a few meters away.

Dejah's stomach growled, and she ignored it. It would be at least another day before the air lift could get to her, and it wasn't worth thinking about food that wasn't available.

She kept up her intermittent comments to the Phoenix as she trudged through the star lit landscape. She checked her clock rarely, having discovered that an hour during the night felt much longer than an hour during the day. The far horizon was still hidden by the darkness of the night, but Dejah felt as though it was as far away as it had ever been.

The stars of the early evening had already set, and the later rising stars were already nearing the horizon. Almost imperceptibly, the sky began to brighten in one corner, off to Dejah's right and somewhat behind her. The sky lightened from a perfect black to a deep blue, then a rich purple, a bright lavender, and as the sun peeked over the edge of the world, the sky turned into the familiar salmon color, though the opposite horizon remained a pale violet.

Dejah paused to watch the sun rise slowly, edging up over the horizon bit by bit. Finally, when half of the disc was visible, she turned back to the north, and continued the journey.

The sun was at its zenith, a degree or two above the horizon, when Dejah decided to stop and rest for a few minutes. She spread out the blanket again, and lay down on it. “Can't fall asleep,” she muttered, struggling to keep her eyes open.

She stared up into the sky, letting the warm colors fill her vision. “I still love living on a red world,” she murmured, “a blue and green world would look too cold.”

Dust blew gently in the slight wind, and Dejah ran a gloved hand through the soil, feeling it slip between her fingers. She rolled over onto her side, ignoring the pain in her shoulders, and watched the dust blow along the surface of the ground. Mars looked different from the angle, she decided sleepily. This close to the ground, her eyes just a few inches from the surface, the dust was a mix of fine powder and larger grains. The rocks came in all sizes, from stones the size of her head, to tiny pebbles no larger than the head of a pin. They were scattered unevenly over the landscape, a virtual forest of rocks.

Dejah dug her hands into the soil even deeper, scraping it away. The dust fell back into the hole, but she kept scooping it out. Her fingers dragged easily through the dust, but the tips scraped agaisnt a harder surface below. She quickly scooped out the remaining dust, and looked into the hole. Below her gloved hand, she saw the bright white gleam of water ice, and smiled.

“Knew it was here,” she muttered. “Not that it does me any good, but it's here!” She scraped a few slivers of ice off, and put them in the palm of her glove. They steamed slightly, subliming away into the thin atmosphere.

The white ice patch stood out strongly against the red earth, and Dejah lay there looking at it for several minutes. Then she noticed that her shadow had moved several inches, and quickly got to her feet.

“Crap, I can't lose that much daylight,” she said, brushing the dust from her gloves. She packed away the blanket, and shouldered the pack again.

She checked her position again, and corrected her course slightly to the west. She was relieved to see that the small formations on the horizon seemed nearer than they had the day before, and felt energized by the short rest.

Dodging the ubiquitous rocks, she pushed ahead, determined to reach the Phoenix as soon as possible. Her comm beeped, and she answered, but didn't stop walking,

“Dej, it's Thomas,” she heard the voice echo in her helmet.

“Hey Thomas, what's up? You on your way?”

“Well, there's a team that's just about ready, we finally got the shuttle we needed, and the supplies are being loaded as I speak.” He cleared his throat, and Dejah could tell that he was nervous.

“So what's the problem, then?”

“We can't get there before nightfall, Dej. We asked, we did everything we could, but they simply won't let us get off the ground until tomorrow morning. They said that you took unnecessary risks by leaving the hab tent site, and that they won't risk more lives to get you out of there at night.”

Dejah chuckled, stepping over a large rock in her path. “So they're still playing it safe, huh? Can't say that I'm particularly surprised.”

“Dej, you've gone two days on just a couple of food packs, and you've already spent one night out there. I'm worried about you spending another one out there. You're burning up incredible amounts of energy just walking in that suit, and you're not taking in any fuel. You're heading further north every minute, and winter is still coming. Even with that blanket between you and the ground, it's going to be incredibly cold, and your body's already used up too much energy, it can't burn much more to keep you warm.”

“i know you're worried, Thomas,” Dejah replied, eyes fixed on the horizon ahead. “And i'm not going to pretend it isn't serious. But I want this. I want this chance to get to the Phoenix. I'm so close, I should hit the site tonight. Then I can mark it, maybe even do a little of the extrication work, so a lift team can come pick it up in the next week or two. We can still make this work, as long as I have time to get to the Phoenix. Don't worry about me, just get that team ready to fly first thing in the morning.”

There was silence on the other end for a minute, then she heard a chuckle. “Damn it, Dej, you are the most impossible person I have ever met. I'll let you go now, you need to focus on conserving as much energy as you can, not talking to me. Eduardo and Kruiser say hi, but they're out prepping the team right now.”

“Well, tell them hi for me, and to get their butts up here as soon as they can tomorrow morning.”

“you got it, Sorenson. Take care of yourself.”

“You, too. And don't worry about me. I can't think of anywhere else I would rather be right now.”

The comm went silent, and Dejah turned her eyes back to the far horizon. She judged it to be about twelve kilometers away; the Phoenix site was only ten kilometers distant.

She could feel her body hesitating as she moved forward. “Come on, Dej. You don't have any fuel for your system, but you're not going to let that stop you. Get your butt in gear.”

Her stomach had stopped growling a few hours ago, and knew that her body was now trying to burn fat for energy.

The sun was dipping back towards the horizon again, and Dejah picked up her pace. Easier to dodge rocks by daylight, she thought, stepping over another rock. Her knees ached from avoiding rocks, her ankles were stiff inside the boots, and her toes were bruised from tripping over some of the stones.

She forced her way through three more kilometers before the sun set below the horizon, turning the sky purple. The stars brightened into view, and Dejah stopped to rest again.

As she spread out the blanket, she felt herself moving more slowly than before. It took her nearly five minutes to unfold the blanket and get it spread out on a level area. She lowered herself into a sitting position on the blanket in a daze.

The horizon had disappeared into the black night again, and she felt like she was existing in a dream world. The stars moved slowly across the sky, and a satellite blinked in the distance.

Dejah leaned against the pack, staring at the horizon. “So close,” she muttered. “So close...got to move.”

She could feel her eyelids getting heavier, and blinked, trying to wake up. “Have to get up now...have to get to the Phoenix, it's so close...”

Her eyes closed, and Dejah was asleep on the frozen surface of Mars.

She wandered over the grey Lunar landscape, wondering why she was there instead of in one of the colonial domes. The regolith was grainy and rough, and every footprint sunk deep into the lunar dust. The light was bright, and the sun looked bigger than it did on Mars, though not as warm. The sky was utterly black and she could see hundreds of stars.

Dejah wandered over the rough, pitted landscape, searching for some clue as to why she was there, and how she had gotten there. The craters were plentiful here, and very rough, not the eroded aged craters of Mars. The sun appeared to be at a strange angle, Dejah thought, and realized she must be near one of the poles.

She came upon a large crater wall, and felt herself drawn to it. She climbed it slowly, searching for handholds in the grainy dust. Finally, she reached the top of the crater wall, and looked down into the center. It was a deep crater, she realized, and the center was completely dark. With a shudder, she realized that it was one of the craters near the poles of the moon, whose interiors never saw the sun. some of the coldest places in the solar system, she remembered, colder even than the surface of distant Pluto. She had once flown over the south pole of the moon, and the craters had been the only thing on Luna that had ever terrified her. Something about the cold, she thought, and the never ending darkness inside.

She looked around for a way to get down, to get away from the darkness in the crater, but the walls of the crater had suddenly grown high and steep, too steep to climb down. Confused and frightened, Dejah balanced on the thin edge of the crater, and tried not to look at the center, but kept her eyes searching the outer walls for a way to get down.

Then her foot slipped on the dusty surface, and she felt herself lose her balance, falling down into the crater. She expected to hit the side of the crater, but found herself free falling, down into the dark center of the crater, into the cold frozen heart of the moon.

She woke up screaming, arms flailing to find something to hang on to. She scrabbled in the dust for a few minutes before realizing that it was no longer the grainy grey regolith of the Earth's moon, but the red dust of Mars, turned somewhat purple by the cold light of the stars overhead. She looked up, wildly glancing around, trying to reorient herself.

“A dream,” she gasped, “just a dream. It's ok, Dejah, just let it go. Let it go.” She pried her fingers away from the dirt, and settled back onto the thin blanket. She looked up at the stars, trying to figure out how long she had been asleep. No more than ten minutes, she thought, though she was stiff with cold.

Dejah carefully got to her feet, ignoring the pain of the muscles that had been overworked. She folded up the blanket again, no longer caring to pack it exactly, and stuffed it into the pack.

“Have to keep moving,” she muttered tiredly. “Have to stay warm. Keep moving.”

Step. Step. Step.

Dejah didn't notice the beeping of her comm at first. She put one foot in front of the other, walking with more determination than awareness, hardly noticing the landscape around her. The night was so long, she thought, so long now.

Finally, the beeping of the wristcomm caught her attention, and she checked the device. “Last known site approaching, five hundred meters.” She blinked, not sure she had read the information correctly, and looked again. The message was the same, and she punched a button to pull up the site map.

A satellite image popped up, and she saw a glowing red dot where the Phoenix had last been spotted. The blue dot indicating her own position was close, just south and west of the location.

She felt a burst of adrenaline, and began walking quickly over the ground, trying not to trip over rocks in the dim star light. She picked her way through the stone littered landscape, eyes scanning the way ahead, looking for any sign of the Phoenix. She pressed the button to activate the comm in her helmet.

“Bradbury Dome, this is Scout Sorenson reporting in. Is anyone awake over there?”

“You think we could sleep tonight with you out there on the surface,” said Thomas, his voice sounding tired but alert.

“Thomas! I just got the alert on my wristcomm, I'm nearing the last known location of the Phoenix! It's about...four hundred meters away now. Wish there was a little more light out here, but I don't want to turn on my helmet lamp until I get a little closer.” She squinted into the darkness, looking for any sign of the old Lander.

“Ok, Dej, you've got to keep calm. Don't make any stupid mistakes now, alright?” She could tell that Thomas was more awake now, and grinned as she realized that he was probably almost as excited as she was.

“Dej, if you get yourself killed now because you weren't paying attention, I swear I'm going to come up there and kick your ass myself!” Eduardo's voice joined Thomas' on the comm, and she couldn't help laughing.

“Eduardo! You're awake too? Geez, doesn't anybody sleep there anymore?”

“Well, we're heading out to come get you in about an hour, as soon as the sun rises here. We're getting prepped now, everything has already been loaded up. You just focus on staying alive. Don't you dare dig for the Phoenix by yourself, you don't have a shovel or any of the tools, and if there are sharp edges anywhere on that metal lander, you could rip your suit wide open.”

“Relax, I'm just going to see what the site is like, mark the lander with the gps, and see if I can scoop a little of the loose dirt away. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid enough to think I can pull off a full extrication on my own.” She worked her way through a few large rocks, and turned her eyes back to the wristcomm. Three hundred meters.

The comm was quiet for a while as she made her way forward, eyes constantly looking for any sign of the lander. All she could see was a field of rocks and dust, but she kept pushing forward.

Two hundred meters. The stars kept moving slowly by overhead, and the night was cold. Dejah could feel the adrenaline rushing through her system, and determined to push as far as she could while the rush lasted. One hundred meters, and still no sign of the lander. Several times she thought she saw something that might have been the machine, but it always turned out to be an oddly shaped rock.

Eighty meters. She could feel herself growing tired again as the first rush of adrenaline wore off, and tried to move faster.

Fifty meters. “It says you're getting close, Dej,” she heard Eduardo comment over the comm. “Any signs yet?”

“Nothing that I can see,” she replied, scanning the ground again. So close, she thought, but where the hell is it?

Thirty meters. Still nothing.

Twenty meters.

And then she saw it.

It lay in a pile on the ground, dust half covering it. The camera assembly had snapped off, and lay a meter away, and the solar panels were nowhere to be seen; Dejah assumed that they would be buried under the thick layer of dust, probably in pieces.

She picked her way through the rocks, and approached the Lander.

“It's here,” she whispered. “It's here, but...”

“But what, Dej?”

“I just...didn't expect it to look like this.”

She blinked back tears. Even after all of Eduardo's extrication scenarios, with the Phoenix in various states of collapse, she had still pictured it as it was in the picture on her living room wall. She had still pictured herself coming on the Lander at sunset, with the old machine standing tall and proud, silhouetted against the sun. Seeing it like this, falling apart into the frozen dust, broke her heart.

“Pretty bad, then? Dej, I'm sorry, but you know that was what we expected. It's been there for thirty winters, we knew it would be in bad shape.”

She didn't respond. Her knees buckled, and she fell to the ground.

“Dejah!” she heard the shout in her comm. “Listen, we've got the satellite over you, and it's picking up your health readings. Your heart rate just dropped, and your oxygen intake isn't looking good. Are you alright?”

She propped herself up on her elbows, and took a deep breath. “No, I think i'm probably not.” Dejah pulled herself to her knees, and then to her feet again. “But i'm too close to stop.”

“No! Just wait where you are! The lift is taking off in thirty minutes, we'll be there in a few hours, you've got to conserve your energy! Just spread out the blanket, concentrate on staying awake, and wait for us.”

“No,” she muttered, taking a hesitant step forward, then another. “Too close.”

“Sorenson, sit down now! You've done your job, we can find and mark the Phoenix when we come get you, now stop it with the dramatics.” Thomas' voice was unusually high pitched, and she could hear the sound of the busy warehouse behind him.

“Sorry boys, but I'm not passing this up. Too late to be the first at much else. But I'm damn sure going to be the first one to touch the Phoenix.”

“Dej, the Dandelion higher ups are here, and they've ordered you to stop.”

“Well, you tell them that I only have one thing to say to that kind of talk: 'screw it.'” One meter to go. She could see the pitted surface of the Lander.

“Cut the act, Dejah! You've done it, alright? You've done what you set out to do, and gone far beyond the call of duty on this. You're already a hero. Why is touching the Lander so important to you? You can get your hands all over it when it comes back to the Dome, surely the museum folks will let you in during the restoration process.”

The ground around the lander, Dejah noticed, was covered with a thin layer of frost. The lander was coated in the familiar red dust, but The distant sun glinted sharply off several of its surfaces. She could no longer feel the heaters in the suit, and her skin was numb and cold.

“Eduardo, my grandmother was one of the people who used the original primitive network. She loved it. She had friends all over the world. She followed the progress of this one. She used to tell me stories, about how she would get excited to see what this machine was doing each day, to look at the pictures it sent from hundreds of millions of miles away. When she told about how it was settling in to freeze in 2008, and the messages that were posted about it…she still got tears in her eyes. It meant something to her.”

“You're not serious, you wouldn't push this hard just because your grandmother was a fan of the Phoenix. It's a damned machine, Dej, it can't tell that you're there. Your heart rate is dangerously low, and you can't fight off that cold much longer. You can't get yourself killed over a machine.”

Reaching out a hand, she brushed a bit of dust from the surface of the Phoenix, and felt an electric thrill as her gloved fingers came in contact with the ancient artifact. She smiled as she rested a hand on the cold, ancient metal. “You know what my grandmother used to say, Eduardo? She said the machine was only the place in which the human spirit, human curiosity, and human endeavor dwelt. Here they were, just learning to reach out to each other, but they still wanted the stars. Think of the time and learning and brilliance it took to put this here. And they flung it out into the stars, knowing it would cease, knowing it would die alone on a distant planet…and they did it anyway.”

She dropped to the ground beside the Lander, slumping against the old metal. “They did all that, just on the chance that they might find out something. How can I do any less?”

With a click, she silenced the communicator. She would deal with Bradbury Dome in a minute. She caressed the metal, and smiled.

“We came back for you, Phoenix.” She brushed more of the dust off of the Lander, and watched it fall to the ground, covering the frost with a layer of cinnamon.

“I guess we make a pretty crazy pair, huh?” she mumbled to the Lander, trying to keep herself awake, and still fighting the tears. “Here I pictured myself coming up over the horizon and finding you standing proud, just waiting. Instead, you're in a million pieces, I could barely even see you through the dust. And here I am, falling apart myself, legs cramping, back aching, shoulders burning, and I can't even dig you out, much less bring you home.”

She felt the tears beginning to slide down her cheeks, and tried to hold them back—the moisture filters in the helmet were equipped to deal with breath, but not tears.

“I wanted to be here more than anything,” she sobbed. “But I just didn't think it would look like this.”

She subsided into silence, and leaned against the cold metal of the lander, no longer caring if the cold chilled her through the suit.

In a daze, she checked her wristcomm. The clock read four tweny five; at least another six hours until the air lift team could come. She thought about just lying down on the dust and falling asleep, but a tiny flame of sheer determination still burned in her soul, and she struggled to stay upright and awake.

She finished brushing the dust from the surface of the Lander, and smiled as she swept the soil from the soil sample analyzer at the front of the Lander, and patted it affectionately. “Good old TEGA,” she murmured. She ran her gloved fingers over the container which she knew contained the names of a quarter million Terrans, fans of space exploration who had sent their names to Mars since they themselves had been earthbound. “Thanks for your faith in us,” she whispered. “We did get here in the end. Because you kept on dreaming, kept on trying.” She cleaned the area as best as she could, and attached the GPS signaller.

She found the robotic arm assembly; it seemed to be intact, but was locked in the frozen soil, and would need a full extrication effort to free it.

Dejah didn't have the energy to move to the far side of the Lander, but she tried to scoop away some of the loose dust from around the sides of the Phoenix. The dust was crusted with frost, but it broke away easily.

Finally, even that small effort was too much, and she let herself rest against the Phoenix. She punched the button to turn her comm back on.

“Sorry about that, but I just needed some time alone.”

There was silence on the other end of the comm.

“Is anyone still there?” she asked, wondering how many of the crew in the warehouse had gone on the flight to rescue her.

“Sorry, Sorenson,” came a familiar voice. “Took me a minute to get over here, I was trying to fix an engine on one of those damn rigs.”

“Kruiser! Where is everyone else?”

“They left a few hours ago, and let me tell you, you gave them a hell of a scare. Honestly, I think they're expecting to find you dead. If they do, I will track down your ghost and kick its ass, you got that?”

She couldn't help laughing, and nodded. “Do my best. Getting pretty sleepy though, I don't know how much longer I can stay awake.”

“Oh no you don't! That crew is on their way to you right now, and they have busted their asses to get you out alive. They gave you the chance to be a hero, to get to the Phoenix, and damn it, you did it! But now you'd rather just lay down and die after living your dream, and deny them the chance to be heroes, too? To hell with that! You hang on, and you give the chance to be the damn cavalry, and save the damn day. Now wake up!”

Dejah tried to hold her eyes open. “Ok, ok, I'll do my best. But it's getting awfully cold out here, and I haven't slept or eaten in two days, Kruiser. You gotta keep talking to me.”

She heard the clang of a tool in the background, and Kruiser muttered a curse. “Hell, Dej, I'm no good at talking. Besides, any of these official comms get recorded so I gotta try to keep it clean, you know? Especially now that you've gone and made it all historically important.”

“Just keep talking, Kruiser. Just keep going.” She stifled a yawn.

“Hey, none of that yawning! You've just got to hang on for three hours, and if you can't do that, I don't give a damn how much you did to get there. If you can't stay awake for a frakking three hours, that makes you a lightweight in my book.”

“Hey, now, that's not fair!”

“That's just the way it is, deal with it.”

“fine.” She tried to stand, but fell back to the ground. “Ouch. Ok, so standing didn't work. Just gonna have to sit here, I suppose.” She shifted herself back onto the blanket, and leaned against the lander. “it's not so bad here, you know, just me and the Phoenix.”

“Tell me what it's like there,” he said, “and remember this is for posterity, so be all fancy and everything.”

She laughed. “Damn, you know I'm no good with words. But it's pretty here. The sun isn't up yet, but I'll probably start seeing the sky get lighter in an hour. Right now the sky is all black, with thousands of stars. I could see jupiter earlier tonight, but it's under the horizon now. There's carbon frost all over everything, and it kind of sparkles, though there's not much light. Everything looks a little bit purple, instead of red, because of the starlight. All the shadows are a deep inky black, and I can't see the horizons at all.”

“What about the Lander itself? They said that you reported that it was in pretty bad condition.”

Dejah blinked again, feeling herself falling asleep again. “Um...yeah. It's pretty bad. The camera is snapped off, and the solar panels are gone, I think they're buried. I don't know what condition the legs are in, but they might be broken too. The Lander itself is half buried, and the robotic arm is completely frozen in the ground. It's all covered in dust and frost, and the surfaces are all pitted from wind and dust.”

Kruiser kept prodding her for information, describing the state of the Phoenix, and plotting extrication techniques that might be useful in retrieving the lander. Dejah occasionally nodded off, but a shout from Kruiser woke her again.

“the sun's coming up now,” she said sleepily. “There's a little patch of purple off to the southeast, and there's not as many stars there as there were before. It's pretty.”

“I bet it is. Just keep hanging on, Sorenson, that flight crew is on their way. Just hang on a little longer.”

“Do my best.”

The sun came up slowly, skidding across the horizon, and Dejah gasped as the light hit the carbon frost. The landscape glittered like gems had been sprinkled over the surface, the light catching every crystal of frost and making it shine.

“Wish you could see this, Kruiser,” she whispered, almost asleep. “Looks like the top of the biggest sugar cookie you ever saw.”

“Sounds tasty, but I think I'll pass. Wake up, Dejah!”

his shout barely roused her from her sleep, and her eyes began to close again. “Sorry, Kruiser...Did my best...Can't hold on any more.”

“No, damn it, you stay with me! You frakking stay with me!”

“Can't do it...really did try though...tell the boys they're heroes to me anyway...” Her eyes fluttered, and slowly closed.

nano post 61

2009-11-30T08:21:00.000-08:00

When Dejah awoke and saw the dim red light of the sun filtered by the blowing dust, she thought she might cry. Four days, she thought, four days! Surely it had to stop soon.

The day was very much like the ones that had preceded it. Dejah woke, checked in with Thomas, ate a quick breakfast, and spent the rest of the day alternating between exercise, sleep, and irritation at being closed in.

Around midday, her comm beeped.

“Hey Dej, have you seen the latest sat images?” Thomas asked. Dejah noticed that the reception on the comm sounded slightly clearer than it had for the previous few days. She glanced up, and realized that she could make out the outline of the other rig through the blowing dust.

“No, I hadn't pulled them up yet today. Is it good news?”

“Looks like it. The satellite even picked up our location a few hours ago, must have been a pretty big gap in the storm.”

Dejah tapped the instrument panel, downloading the satellite images. The storm had moved on, and the rigs were now in the trailing edge of the cloud.

“Hey, that's fantastic!” she shouted, waking Eduardo from a nap.

“Ugh...what's fantastic? I still just see dust.”

She showed him the satellite images, and he whooped loudly. “At this rate, we'll be able to get outside in an hour or two!”

Dejah grinned and nodded. “Yeah, looks like it. Alright guys, let's put together a checklist to make sure that we do everything right, instead of running around like dust devils. First, let's clean up the inside of the rig cabins—I don't know about you, Thomas, but we've made a bit of a mess over here. I don't want anything out of place when we get moving again. Let's check for trash, make sure that's all in the compactors, and get the beds put away. Once we can leave the rigs, let's go over the outsides of the rigs. Each team checks their own rig. If there's no obvious damage outside, then we need to get into those engines, and see if the seals held. If the seals are good, then we need to pull the air filters and see they need to be replaced—they may not, they can take a lot of dust, but we'll see. Once that's done, we can get underway.”

“And if the seals are busted?” asked Thomas.

“Then we need to get on the comm to Bradbury Dome as soon as possible and get a lift team on its way here. It'll take them two days to get here, so once that's done, we'll need to find a way to keep from going crazy during that time.”

As the morning passed, the dust outside lessened gradually. Dejah watched as she could finally see the other rig clearly, and then a few of the nearby geological features, and finally the far horizon.

When the sky was clear, she called over the comm, “Alright boys, let's get out of here!” She slipped into her exploration suit and sealed the helmet.

Eduardo popped the seals on the rig door, and swung the door open. They climbed out, looking around the landscape. Dust was drifted thick against the wheels, and the rigs were almost red with the stuff.

Dejah and Eduardo made their way around the rig, checking all of the seals and the surfaces.

“I don't see any damage, Dej,” Eduardo commented. “You got anything?”

“No, it all looks good here. Let's go ahead and check those engines.”

They moved to the front of the rig. Eduardo unlatched the engine cover, and popped it open.

They stared at the engine inside. The seals around the inside of the cover were cracked and crumbling, and the engine was coated in red dust.

“Oh shit,” Eduardo commented.

Year Twenty Fifty Two

The sun was a cold bright disc in the sky, and the western half of the sky was a faint purple. Dejah slogged forward through the dusty landscape, stumbling occasionally over rocks that were hidden in the dust.

She hummed to herself, trying to keep herself focused and awake, sometimes breaking the silence with commentary.

“Ok, watch out for the rock there...can't afford to trip...there you go...”

She looked at the horizon ahead. It was slightly rough, like the outline of a crumpled piece of paper. The Phoenix was out there, somewhere. Only twenty kilometers now, she thought, checking the distance on the map.

Step. Step. Step.

“the damn horizon never looks any closer,” she muttered to herself. Her legs were numb, and she forced herself forward. “Not gonna give up. Not this close.”

She stepped forward again, setting a booted foot on the dusty soil, watching at the motion sent a puff of dust into the air. It swirled for a moment, then settled. She turned and looked behind her again. The trail of footprints led off into the distance for kilometers. “Too bad these won't last like they would on Luna,” she commented, “they'd last forever there.”

She turned back to the path ahead. “I kind of like that thought, of there being a permanent trail of footprints, all the way up to the top of the world...but in a few days the wind'll cover them up again.”

The silence was overwhelming, so Dejah kept talking, having had her fill of silence for the last few days.

“I suppose I should start working on a speech for the museum opening. I never was good at those sorts of things. Let's see...'Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to the opening of the new Mars Heritage museum...' Alright, that's boring as hell. Maybe 'Ladies and gentleman, welcome to Mars as you've never seen it before...' No, it's not a damn movie. Crap.”

Her boot snagged on a stone, and she lunged forward, stumbling as she tried to keep her footing. She scowled, and kicked the rock away. “Fine, so I'll just work on the speech later.”

She checked her wristcomm and found that she had begun to veer of to the east, and corrected her course. The sun was slowly sinking, its bottom edge almost touching the horizon.

“What's that, maybe an hour before sunset?” She judged the remaining time left. “Might as well keep walking through the night, it's the only way to make it to the Phoenix on time. And it'll help me stay awake.”

She shifted the pack on her back, and felt the deep aches of exhaustion in her shoulders. “Ugh,” she grunted, “that is not a great sign. Phoenix, little buddy, you damn sure better appreciate this when I get there.”

the edge of the sun touched the horizon, and the sky began to darken, a deep purple spreading across the landscape. Elongated shadows stretched behind each stone and dune, thin inky shapes tracing along the ground. Dejah's own shadow streamed across the dusty soil far into the distance. As she walked forward, it rippled and waved, looking like some strange creature.

Even through her thick suit, Dejah could feel the chill settling in as the sun sank lower. Soon it was a brightly glowing half disc perched on the edge of the world, then just an incandescent sliver and finally it slipped away and was gone, leaving only a bright purple area of sky over the horizon. Dejah looked to the other side of the sky, where the stars were coming out in a black sky.

“Quite a sight out here,” she breathed. “Phoenix, I can see why you would want to stay here,” she added. “Not that you can hear a word I say, you're just a machine. But if I don't talk to someone out here, I'm going to go crazy, and quite honestly you're the closest thing for hundreds of kilometers. And,” she grinned to herself, “it's not like you can tell any one that I went a little loopy and started talking to a machine, right?”

The night darkened, until the entire dome of the sky was black, dotted with thousands of stars. It was harder to see the way ahead, and Dejah slowed her pace, trying to avoid the rocks in her path.

The ground looked a dim purple in the starlight, and the horizons were invisible, blending seamlessly into the dark of the night.

“Don't worry about the night,” she muttered, stepping around a large rock outcropping. “I'm coming for you, just hold on a little longer. You should see the place they've got prepared for you in Bradbury Dome, you're going to love it. It looks a lot like this, actually, except there's no dust storms. Gods, I am so tired of the storms! I never really thought about them in the Domes, they're not that big of a deal there. I hate having something as stupid as dust keep me from going forward, you know? Actually, I bet you do know—that dust played havoc with your solar panels, didn't it?”

She pushed forward, her steps falling into the rythym of her speech.

“Anyway, you'll like the museum. There's a lot of people who are really excited to see you, and there will be a steady stream of people through the museum, even after the big opening. You're one of the big reasons why we're here on Mars, after all.”

She paused, and looked around. The ground here was flat, and mostly free of rocks. She could feel her arms and back aching from the weight of the pack, and her legs were beginning to quiver. “Damn,” she muttered, and let the pack slide to the ground. She rummaged through it, and pulled out a blanket. She unfolded it halfway, and spread it on the ground, then lowered herself into a sitting position.

“Too cold to sit on the ground, even with the damn suit,” she muttered. “Just gonna sit for a minute, let my legs relax and get some energy back.”

She leaned against the pack, and looked up at the stars. Orion was rising, and Jupiter was a bright cold dot in the sky. She could hear the faint whirring of the ventilation system in the suit, recycling her air, keeping the moisture in her breath from fogging up the faceplate in the helmet. The suit heaters struggled to keep up with the creeping cold, and Dejah shivered.

“I don't miss the Dome as much as I thought I might,” she stated, pushing back the silence again. “Even with the storms, the dust, everything that's happened...I don't think I'd trade this for anything. Well, a little more heat would be nice, I'm not a huge fan of dying of hypothermia, but aside from that, this is perfect.”

She stretched her legs out, wincing as the overused muscles cramped. She leaned forward, wishing again for more movement in the suit, and tried to loosen the tight muscles. Slowly, the cramps subsided, and she breathed easier, massaging her aching legs.

“Aw, hell, that's not a good sign. I'm going to have to get moving again soon, and I don't know if I can get up for a while.” She leaned back against her pack again, and looked up at the sky, fixing her eyes on Jupiter.

“I can't get stuck out here,” she muttered, flexing her gloved fingers. “Im going to do this, I'm going to bring the Phoenix home. I'm not going to die out here just to be forgotten in a few years.” She struggled to her feet, and pulled the pack back into place on her shoulders.

“Alright, Phoenix baby, I'm coming.”

nano post 60

2009-11-30T08:20:00.000-08:00

The day passed in a dim red haze. Eduardo, after finally waking up, alternated between taking cat naps and reading his book. Once or twice he got up and stretched his arms and legs. Dejah had taken to pacing in the tiny space: from the seat to the sleeping space and back again. Finally Eduardo set his book down and grabbed her wrist.

“Will you just sit down and settle for a minute? You're making me nervous!”

She flopped into the driver's seat again, and rested her fingers on the wheel. “Sorry, I just hate being stuck like this! I need to be out and moving around, not stuck being unable to move. Hell, I can't even see out of the damn window!” She slammed a fist against the steering wheel. “It just drives me crazy, you know!”

“Hey, I get that. It's not exactly my idea of a great vacation, you know? But it is what it is. There's not a damn thing I can do about it, so I'm going to take advantage of the time, and get as much rest as I can.” He shifted his weight, and drifted back into sleep.

Dejah leaned over the instrument panel, and began punching buttons, calling up the latest satellite images. The connection was sporadic, often intererupted by the storm, and it took over an hour just to download the images. She paged through them restlessly, looking for a clue as to the storm's expected duration, knowing that it was usless.

The storm was a discolored blotch on the images, a shapeless mass draped over the landscape, moving with a mind of its own. She pulled up the last known position of the rigs, and laid the image over the storm pictures. The scale was slightly off, but she thought it looked like the rigs were near the center of the storm.

“Only halfway?” she muttered. “This thing could drag on for another two days if it doesn't dissipate. Two more days of this, and I really will go crazy.”

She checked her watch again. Three seventeen. The sky oustide was still dark with the dust.

The comm beeped. “Hey Dej, how's it going over there?”

“Fine, I guess, or at least as good as could be expected. Still going stir crazy, but Eduardo seems to be coping ok. Listen, I pulled up the satellite image of our last known position. I know it's a little off, since our transmitter only sends that information in bursts, but it's better than nothing. It looks like we may be only halfway through the storm now; if it doesn't break up, we may be in for another two days before it clears.”

He was silent for a moment. “That makes me a little bit worried about the engines, actually. No wonder kruiser was restless on the comm this morning, they must have told him not to say too much so we wouldn't worry.”

“What's wrong with the engines,” Dejah asked, feeling a slight twinge of fear.

“Well, even under the best of conditions, our engine seals aren't really meant to hold up in these circumstances. One day or two, average dust storm times, no problems. But not four days. And Kruiser was worried that the new seals weren't as good as the old kind, but I don't know if there's any truth to any of that.”

There was a brief gap in the dust, and Dejah could barely make out the other rig. It sat a few meters away, and she caught a glimpse of the lighted cabin before the curtain of dust closed in again.

“you know,” Dejah commented, settling back into the seat, “what I miss more than anything else, I think, is the people. It wouldn't be so bad if Eduardo didn't keep falling asleep, but I'm really not used to spending much time alone with my thoughts. It's not really my thing.”

Thomas laughed again, and Dejah was glad to hear the uniquely human sound.

“Man, I bet you're really loving this,” she said with a smile. “Several days, shut up in a space all your own, everyone else is only reachable by comm. I mean, come on, you don't even have to see anyone else!”

“Introverts need people, too, Dej. We just need them in different ways.” His voice was calm and steady, and Dejah felt some of her nervous energy slip away.

“Hey, you know, I never even asked you. Do you prefer to go by Oliver or Thomas? I just started calling you Thomas because Eduardo did, I never thought to ask.” dejah traced a meaningless pattern in the fine layer of red dust that had settled on the instrument panel. No matter how quickly one got out of the rigs and shut the doors, she thought, some of the dust was bound to get in.

“Either one is fine. My friends outside of work usually call me Oliver, but I've gotten pretty used to Thomas in the field.”

“that's good,” Dejah commented, “Because I think I would have the hardest time calling you Oliver at this point. I'd always have to stop and think about it, and then i'd get all tongue tied.”

“I didn't think extroverts ever got tongue tied,” he said, poking gentle fun at her.

“Oh, ha ha,” she said sarcastically, “very funny. Just because I like to talk doesn't mean that I don't get confused.”

“Well, if you need someone to talk to to keep you from going crazy for the next few days, I'm here.”

She peered through the windshield, trying to see the other rig again, but the dust was thick, and she couldn't see more than a few centimeters past the glass. “won't that drive you crazy, though?”

“Not really,” came the cheerful reply. “I've gotten a lot of silence for the last two days, so a little conversaiton is a good thing. And to be honest, I've had several decades of ecperience in tuning people out when I have to.”

“Oh. I guess that makes sense.” She settled back into the chair, and stretched her arms over the back of the seat. “So, Thomas, how long have you been on Mars?”

“Let me think...About ten years, I think. I came out when I was about thirty two, so that should be right.”

“What made you come out here? Did you grow up on Earth or in the colonies?”

“On Earth. I'm originally from Missouri. Grew up in a small town on the banks of a river. I miss the trees sometimes. I wish I could just one day be driving along in one of my rigs, and just there on the horizon would be a dark green patch. I'd drive closer and closer, and eventually be in the middle of a forest, surrounded by trees. I'd open the door of the rig, and be able to breathe. Clean, open air, you know, not the processed stuff of the Domes. It's better than it used to be, since they actually started planting some trees in the domes, but it's not the same as the open air. I'd get out and walk around, just breathing for a while. Then i'd probably kick my shoes off, and just dig my toes into the grass and the mud, feel that good soil under my feet instead of loose dust and gravel. Maybe even lay down on my back for a little while, look up at the sky. It wouldn't be that dry orange sky anymore, it would be a beautiful deep blue, like forget me nots. I'd just lie there for a while, listening to the sounds of the leaves waving softly in the breeze, and the funny sounds that the grass makes when there are insects creepingg through it. Eventually, I'd begin to realize that the plants weren't the only sounds in the area; there'd be the faintest hint of this other sound, and I'd get up to find it, and finally find myself beside a little stream. Have you ever noticed the way water smells when it flows over bare rocks? Probably not, I don't think even Spirit City has rivers, even synthetic ones. There might be one in Opportuinity Dome, but I doubt they could afford the water rates.”

He paused for a moment, then continued. “Water flowing over rocks has this incredible smell. It makes me think of gunpowder, even though they don't smell anything alike.”

“I don't know how gunpowder smells,” Dejah commented quietly. “No explosives allowed in the domes, the oxygen mix is too combustible.”

“That's a shame. Someday, if you ever visit Earth, set off some fireworks. There's no smell quite like that. It's wild, and a little bit metallic, and it smells a little bit like dirt, too. Anyway, that's what i'd smell, that wild stable smell of water on the rocks. I'd roll up the legs on my coveralls, and step into that water, feeling it tickling my ankles. It would be cold, so cold that it would hurt for a minute or two until I got used to it. The rocks would feel a little rough, but mostly slippery from the moss and algae that would be growing on them. I'd just stand there, in the water, for a while, enjoying the sights and smells, watching all that red dust wash off of my feet. I get so tired of red all the time, Dejah. It's everywhere: the ground, the sky, on eeveryone's clothes, on all the buildings, all of the machines. I just want to see some blue and green once in a while. I think I'd give almost anything for a green horizon again.”

Dejah didn't respond for a moment, lost in the picture he had painted with his words. “I wish I could say that I understand that, Thomas. I really do. But I can't even imagine it. I grew up in a lunar colony. It was a big one, with a lot of stuff, but the horizon was always either grey or black. Nothing there but dust and craters. Mars was everything I wanted. I never get tired of looking at that huge red horizon, stretching away forever in the distance.”

He chuckled quietly. “You know, they used to talk about the so called 'generation gap,' the disparity of experience between generations that made it difficult for them to really communicate. Well, the nets did away with a lot of that. Now I guess we've got the 'world of origin' gap. I don't know that a born Terran can ever really understand how a born Lunie feels. You talked about this huge Aresian horizon...but see, it always feels small to me. I always feel like if I walk too fast, I'm going to step over the edge of the world. Most Terrans up here feel the same way. You never quite get used to it. Things are too close, even the wide open spaces are too small.”

Silence fell for a minute, then Dejah asked, “So, if you miss so many things about Earth, why did you leave?”

He was quiet for a moment, and Dejah wondered if she'd asked something too personal. Then he answered, “It's complicated. Sometimes I'm not sure myself. I guess there's several answers. It was a lot easier ot get work out here. Back home I was just another truck driver, one of millions on the road at any time. Here, there are only a couple of hundred licensed rig drivers. Makes it a lot easier get paying work. And it seemed like a big adventure when I was younger. Not too many people were going over who weren't scientists then. Even the University was mostly taking on people who had already graduated from another school in the Earth system. They only started taking high school graduates recently.” He paused again, and sighed. “but that's not the real reason, of course. I was married when I was pretty young, just a little over twenty. Pretty girl, you know, my high school sweetheart. She had this incredibly curly brown hair. Loved her like crazy, but I never was any good at expressing it. The baby came, and she was so happy, and I was too, but she thought that I spent too much time at the garage and not enough time at home. I was always tired when I got home, and tended just to keep to myself. She got more and more frustrated, and I didn't know what she wanted me to do. I was bringing home money to keep her and the kid fed and clothed. If i'd just been able to explain to her...” Dejah heard his voice crack.

“Thomas, I'm sorry, you don't have to tell me, I didn't realize it was such a personal question. I'm always asking people to share things that are just too personal.” dejah shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

“No, it's ok. I'm actually able to talk about it now, though I wasn't there for a long time. Things got worse and worse; I'd work a twelve hour day, and come home too tired to even talk, and she'd meet me at the door with the baby crying, and get made when I wouldn't talk about my day. Finally, one day I came home, and it was dark outside, I'd been at the garage for almost sixteen hours, doing some extra work. I got home, and the house was dark inside. Our room was trashed, with things thrown everywhere—she must just have tossed things anywhere as she tried to pack up all of her stuff. But she was gone, and there was a note on the table. It just said, 'I'm finally going to give you what you always wanted and leave you alone. The house will be quieter now, and you'll have all of the privacy you want.' I called her mom, to see if she was there, but she wouldn't even talk to me, just told me never to contact her again. Even now, I don't know where Maggie is, or how Casey is doing. She'd be about thirteen now. Probably a mass of freckles and her mom's curly hair. I've still got her baby picture in my wallet, you know. I even wrote her a letter, trying to explain everything. It's with my will, and my lawyer's been instructed to find her and give her the letter if anyhting happens to me.”

“So you came up here to get away from the memories.”

“Pretty much. Again, there was work here, and land and houses were cheap, if you could afford the transport to get here in the first place. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Sometimes I really like it here, too; I shouldn't give you the impression that I'd hop the first transport back to Earth. I like the freedom out here, and there's some really exciting developments that have happened here. Besides, if I'd given up and gone back, I wouldn't be here now.”

Dejah laughed, “What, stuck in a Martian dust storm that might last for for days, without being able to see anything through the windshields?”

He joined in the laughter. “No, I mean, here on this mission. Recovering the Phoenix. Getting the chance to work with one of the greatest Aresian explorers to walk on the red planet.”

Dejah could feel herself blushing. “Hey, hey, that's going a little too far, now.”

“Actually, I don't think so.” Dejah could hear the seriousness in his voice, though he still spoke lightly. “If we do manage to pull this off, you'll be the explorer who led the mission to retrieve the last Earth probe. And this mission really is pretty difficult, when you compare it to some of the others. The Phoenix is hundreds of kilometers from any of the settlements, and it's farther north than any other lander or rover. Since it's been covered—we assume—it's tricky to find, and can't be recovered by airlifting someone in to attach a harness. Plus, the time line that Heritage needs is pretty crazy—we just had enough time to train to the level that the mission would require, and winter's coming up. I don't know of any mission that's done anything like that.”

Dejah shrugged, running a piece of paper under her fingernails to remove the red dust that always ended up caked there. “It's not nearly as amazing as being one of the first colonists. You know how much I would give to have been Audra Kerrigan, or Karin Oleson? Even Armstrong or Aldrin, just the first to see a new world!” She sighed, and tucked the paper into a small waste compactor unit in the instrumental panel. “The Phoenix is hot news now, but what about when we colonize Europa? I'm too late to be one of the first on Mars, and too early for Europa. When that happens, anything like the Phoenix mission will be swept away, into the trash compactor of history.”

“I bet those kids in California don't think so. Or the ones in India. Or any of the other classrooms who saw your recordings and wrote to you.”

“At any rate,” she said dismissively, “we'll have to get back with the Phoenix for any of us to be considered heroes. Let's not count our rockets before they ignite.”

He laughed, sensing that that topic of discussion was now off-limits, and remarked, “You Lunies, you always think you have to come up with new things. It's 'don't count your chickens before they hatch.'”

“But i've never seen a chicken hatch,” she protested. “Hell, Thomas, I've never seen a chicken, except for those little frozen patties that my mom would cook sometimes.”

“all the more reason for you not to count them.”

Dejah stood in the sleeping area, and stretched. The area was barely large enough for her to stand up straight, but she could stretch her legs. She slid into a slow split, wincing as her muscles stretched. “Oh man, I've been sitting in that seat for too long.” She held the pose for a minute, feeling the muscles slowly stretch and regain their elasticity. She got to her feet again, and bent over to touch her head to her knees, hamstrings burning in protest. She gritted her teeth and held the position for thirty seconds before straightening up.

She let herself drop into a sitting position and began to stretch her arms over her head.

Eduardo looked up from his book and watched her for a minute. “how much time have you actually spent relaxing, Dej?”

“too much,” she puffed, turning over onto her belly and beginning a series of push ups. “I'm way too stiff, and if I don't get a decent workout while I'm in here, it's only going to get worse. Besides, I have to do something! If I look at that red storm out there for one more minute, i'm liable to smash the windshield.”

He put his book back in his bag. “How often did you relax when we were in the dome? I don't think I ever saw you do anything that wasn't work.”

“Oh, I did,” she said, voice slightly muffled as it echoed off the floor. “Sometimes my friend Max would visit and we'd go out to eat, or I'd stop by the bookstore in town. I even took the Valkyrie out to the cliffs a time or two.”

“A time or two,” he repeated, “in two years? See, that's what I mean. You probably put in what, seventy, eighty hours a week at Dandelion?” He shook his head. “you always act like there's something that's gonna grab you if you slow down for even a second. That can't be healthy.”

“It got me this far, and I've done pretty well.”

“It got you this far, and you're going crazy now that you can't run anymore.” He draped an arm over the back of the seat, and asked, “So what is it that has you running this scared?”

She did a final push up, and rolled over, clasping her hands behind her head for sit ups. “Hey, make yourself useful, and I'll answer that. Hold my feet for me.”

Eduardo clambered out of the chair and held her feet down to the floor. She began her routine, and said, “I'm not afraid of anything. At least, not anything out here. I never was very fond of some of those lunar craters that never saw sunlight. You ever look at the pictures of those, those incredibly black spots on the map? Always gave me the willies.”

He shook his head. “Nah, I still think you're running from something here. Something that you just can't seem to shake, and you think you've got to keep yourself busy so it won't get you.”

“Just drop it, Eduardo.”

But he persisted. “I don't think you're afraid of dying. I've never known a Scout who was afraid of that, they've all got some kind of death wish to be in that kind of job. And you're one of the best Scouts I've seen, so that can't be it.”

“I'm not sure whether to thank you or punch you for that one.” She began to feel tired, but kept pushing herself.

He snapped his fingers, and leaned over the back of the seat. “I know what it is! You're afraid of being forgotten.”

Dejah glared at him and kept excersizing without responding.

“that's it, isn't it? You don't want to be forgotten. That's why you're pushing yourself so hard for this, and it's why you can't sit still. You think that you're losing time, that if you don't move as fast as possible to do something, that you'll never do anything. In fact, I'm willing to bet that you're as pragmatic about this as you are about everything else, and you're always trying to minimize your losses. You probably run from anything that you're not certain to succeed at, so that no one will know that you failed, and you can direct your efforts towards something more important to you.”

“Hey!” she shouted, jumping to her feet. “would you stop it already? You don't have any right to say that kinda crap to me, alright? Just leave me alone!”

She turned around in a tight circle, feeling the impulsive need to run, but there was nowhere to go. She finally threw herself into the driver's seat, and began trying to call up the latest satellite images, but the dust was too thick, and the signal kept dropping.

“Hey, Dej, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you, alright?” Eduardo looked over at her. “I just get interested in how people work, you know? I push that too far sometimes.”

Dejah breathed quietly for a moment, trying to settle her racing heart. “It's alright, Eduardo. We're all just stressed from being cooped up in here. I mean, it would be one thing if we could put on suits and just move around outside for a while, but that's a death warrant in a storm like that. You could get lost in three seconds flat, not to mention the damage any sand caught up in there could do to a suit.”

He nodded. “Yeah, i'm really ready to get out and do some walking. And some digging, when it comes to that. How many days travel do we have once we get moving again?”

She checked the maps again. “About four days, assuming top speeds most of the way there. It's still very doable.” She paused, and Eduardo looked up.

“What?”

“Well, I'm just a little worried. You were sleeping when I was talking with Thomas earlier, but it seems there may be a problem with our engine seals.”

He groaned. “Oh, no, no way! Those were replaced right before we left!”

Dejah nodded. “And that might be the problem. It seems like the old seals were replaced with a newer model, a cheaper one. Kruiser wasn't real happy about trying the new kind, but it was the only one the accounting department would approve. If that wasn't enough, there have been rumors of a recall on the parts.”

The older man stared out the window at the driving dust. “so even when the storm is past, we may not be able to get moving.”

Dejah nodded again. “You got it. If the seals are busted, the engines will be toast, they'll have to go back for a complete clean. We'll have to call for one of those monster copters, and get the rigs lifted out and back to the base. It usually takes a while to get that kind of operation in gear, so I imagine we'd be stuck for another two, maybe three days after that. By the time we got back to the Dome, got another set of rigs and moved the supplies over, it would be at least a week, maybe ten days if things take a while to requisition.”

Eduardo rested a foot on frame of the rig. “Too late to start back out on the trip. We'd get there when winter was beginning to settle in.”

“Bingo.”

He looked troubled and a little angry, and Dejah decided to refrain from talking about the situation further.

Night came, and the three explorers took to their makeshift beds as they had for the past few evenings. Dejah tosses and turned, but could not seem to fall asleep as easily as she had before.

“Must be the workout from earlier,” she muttered, rolling over onto her back. She could see the windshield, which looked utterly black in the night. It was odd to have a night sky without stars, she thought. It seemed as strange as living on a blue planet.

Her mind wandered to the mission ahead. What if the seals were broken and the engines unuseable? The thought of staying in the rigs for another two days, waiting for an airlift back to the Dome, made her feel sick to her stomach, and her hands twitched involuntarily at the thought of more forced inactivity. She turned over onto her side, and thought of the rover in the back of the rig. It was capable of reaching the site in almost the same amount of time as the rigs, though it would be grueling to drive the distance in a vehicle like that. But it was equipped to carry a folded hab tent and several pounds of other assorted survival items. It might be possible...

She turned over once again, and slowly drifted into sleep, thinking of moving forward again, of rovers and red planets.

nano post 59

2009-11-30T08:13:00.000-08:00

Dejah woke up in the middle of the night. The rig was cold, though the heaters were working, powered by small atomic units that were guaranteed to run for decades. She shivered, and realized that the thing blanket she had pulled over herself had fallen off. She tugged it back into place, and lay down again.

The star filled sky was visible through the windsheild, and she watched the stars slowly make their rotation. The occasional meteor streaked through the air on its way to a fiery death, and once a dust devil blew through the camp.

Finally, she was lulled back to sleep by the calm steady blinking of the lights on the instrument panel. She slept until the alarm on her wristcomm beeped.

“Time to get up and do it all again,” she muttered, pushing back the blanket and getting to her feet. Eduardo stirred on his mat, which had been pushed back against the back of the seats of the rig, and blinked as he opened his eyes.

“Time already:”

“Yep. Wakey wakey.”

He groaned and pulled the blanket over his head for a moment, before sighing and getting to his feet. “I suppose this wouldn't be the time to remind you that I'm really not a morning person?”

“No, you did plenty of that on the twenty four hour exercises.” Dejah tossed him a food packet, and stepped into the cab of the rig.

She saw Thomas doing the same, and waved to him again through the windshield.

“Good morning, sunshine,” she called over the comm, “glad to see that you're already up—I wasn't really in the mood to wake up another bear this morning.”

“Tell Eduardo to get his lazy butt out of bed—we roll in ten minutes, unless you have other plans.” Thomas settled into the driver's seat, and buckled his harness.

“No problems here, I'm ready to roll.” She turned to call over her shoulder. “Eduardo! Come on, get ready, we're gonna head out in a few minutes.”

“Yeah, I heard, I heard,” he muttered, running his hands through his hair. “I'm up. Just lemme finish my food.”

A few minutes later, under a sky still dark with night, the rigs began to roll slowly forward again.

The day was long, and Dejah took a nap around noon, before putting on an exploration suit and joining Thomas in his rig to give him a break.

Sixteen hours later, the rigs slowed to a halt again in the dark. Dejah put on the suit again, and went back to join Eduardo as they camped for the night.

“Come on, guys, only five more days of this!” she exclaimed, taking off her helmet after the Flint's doors sealed. “We're making great time.”

Eduardo was hunched over the intstrument panel, frowning.

“What's wrong?” she asked, leaning over the panel to take a look.

“I just got a comm from Bradbury Dome,” he said, pointing to the latest weather satellite images. “See this? This is a huge storm that's building up. It's headed right for us, too.”

Dejah looked at the images. “Well...ok, yeah, that's not good, but can't we just push through on instrument readings?”

He shook his head. “Not here we can't. The ground's a little unstable, and I wouldn't want to risk driving on it without being able to see what i'm getting into. If we nose over the edge of a gully and get stuck, it'll take an airlift to get the rig out again, and that would be the end of it—they'd have to take the rig back to the base to get the engine and seals checked.”

“How much time do we have before the storm hits?” she asked.

“Ten hours, give or take. We should stay put and get some sleep, then try to do some driving tomorrow. It may not be bad, but I don't want to risk the rig.”

“Ok, sounds like a plan. Any idea on how long the storm might last?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s still developing. We probably won’t know until it’s over. Could be a day or two, could be a week.”

Dejah looked around the cabin of the rig. “Well, let’s get to sleep as quickly as we can, and wake up two hours early. We can get an early start and get as far as we can.”

Eduardo nodded, and Thomas commed his approval of the plan.

“Alright, it is now three in the morning! Rise and shine, campers!” Thomas’ calm voice over the comm caused the other two explorers to groan and sit up slowly, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

Dejah rested her head on her knees, and called out, “Hey, is it too late to take back that whole ‘let’s get up two hours early’ thing?”

“Yep.”

Ten minutes later the rigs began to roll forward under the night sky. The ground looked a pale blue under the cold light of the stars; Dejah watched out the window as the rig’s shadow rippled along the uneven ground, an inky black companion.

She heard a small noise, and looked over to see Eduardo yawn, blinking his eyes rapidly. “Hey, you look tired.”

“Getting up two hours early will do that to you,” he said with a tired grin. “Besides, I didn’t sleep too well last night. Couldn’t get comfortable.”

“Were you worrying about the storm?”

He shrugged. “That, too, I suppose. It’s ok, I’m fine to drive.”

“No, let me take over for a while,” Dejah said, unfastening her harness. “You drove for the last part of the day yesterday, and I got more sleep than you did.”

She clicked the comm. “Hey Thomas, stop for just a second, I’m switching with Eduardo.”

“Copy that.”

The two switched places, and Dejah adjusted the controls. Soon, they were underway again.

The day passed much like the one before, until the sun neared it’s zenith. Dejah heard a beeping, and looked down at the instrument panel.

“Storm Alert,” a light on the panel flashed. She glanced at the horizon, and saw a line of dirty red cloud near the ground.

“You see that, Dej?” Thomas’ calm voice came over the comm.

“Yeah, I see it. Looks like we have about ten minutes, you think?”

“Maybe a little more. Does this look like a good stopping place to you?”

Dejah looked through the windshield at the land around the rigs. It was flat and featureless, and she responded, “Yeah, things look pretty good here. Let’s wait it out here.”

The rigs slowed to a halt, and Dejah locked down all the brakes. She slipped out of her harness, and turned to ask Eduardo a question, but found him sleeping, head thrown back against the seat. She grinned, and decided not to wake him.

At first, it hardly seemed that the storm was moving at all; it still looked like a red blurriness around the horizon. But over the next few minutes, the cloud reached towards them, stretching up to fill more and more of the sky.

Now Dejah could more clearly see the leading edge of the storm. It roiled with airborne dust and sand, and moved rapidly over the flat floor of the desert.

She had once seen news footage from Earth, when a dam had broken after heavy floods. The dirty water had surged forward, throwing itself toward the city in its path, as if urged on by a frenzied malevolence. The edge of the storm looked just like that, Dejah thought, as it bore down on them.

“You watching this, Dej?”

She nodded, and looked at the rig parked beside her own. She could see Thomas through the windshield, and wondered how long the visibility would last.

They fell back into silence as the storm came closer. Dejah could hear a slight whistling as the wind picked up, rushing by the parked vehicles. In the distant, she heard a roaring sound, faint at first, but rapidly growing louder.

Eduardo stirred, and blinked, waking groggily. “Have we stopped? Is this where…” His eyes focused, just in time to see the edge of the dust storm fill the windshield.

“Holy…!” he muttered, and then it hit.

The first blast of the wind rocked the rig, and Dejah swore in surprise. The light of the sun was quickly blocked out by the dust, and the world disappeared in a swirl of red.

Dejah could hear a faint sound, like the ambience of an open comm line. Wind brushing the dust over the metal, she assumed.

Thomas asked over the comm, “you guys alright over there?”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” she responded, not taking her eyes off of the maelstrom outside. “That’s one hell of a wind, though. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a wind that could shake a rig like that. Glad it seems to have stabilized. Nothing more to do but wait it out.”

“Copy that. I’ll comm if anything comes up, you do the same.”

Dejah set the comm down, and looked around and rig cabin. It looked odd, having no view from the windows. Very little light came through, and the light that did filter through the dust was a deep red.

“Not much to do now,” Eduardo commented, as he rummaged through a bag, pulling out a battered paperback book. “I told you that you should have brought one of these.”

“I've never been much of a reader,” she replied, trying to find a comfortable place from which to watch the storm passing in front of the rig.

The whirling sand was hypnotizing, and she found herself gradually drifting off into a shallow sleep. Every time Eduardo turned a page in his book, she would flutter back to consciousness, only to be greeted by the dust storm again.

It was impossible to tell how much time was passing; the light was too dim to notice any of the small changes that ordinarily served as markers.

Finally, Dejah moved to the sleeping space behind the seats. She heated and ate the contents of a food pouch, then lay down and attempted to sleep.

When she awoke, she checked her watch. Ten thirty eight a.m., it read. “At least I finally got a chance to sleep all the way through the night,” she muttered, pulling the blanket back. Eduardo was still asleep, sprawled on the floor on the other side of the small space.

Dejah clicked her comm. “Thomas, you awake yet?”

“I'm here,” he commed back. “Been awake for a little while, but not long. This light has me all screwed up. At least when the dust storms hit the dome, the city lights give you some clue.”

“I know what you mean. I don't think I've ever slept in till ten in my life. At least it's a chance to catch up on our rest. I'm going to have to ffigure out some sort of exercise routine that I can do in the cab, or I'm going to go crazy. Suppose I should wait till Eduardo gets up though, I don't think he'd appreciate being woken up by a foot in the face.”

Thomas laughed. “Yeah, you don't want to do that. He'll probably be up soon. I've already made a call in to Bradbury dome to let them know the situation here. They're still not sure when the storm will be over, so they told us to just sit tight. Kruiser was pretty worried, though. He said that the engine seals had been replaced just before we went out, and he didn't like the new batch they put on. It's a newer, cheaper brand apparently. But you know him, he's a worrywart when it comes to the rigs and rovers, so I'd take any of that with a grain of salt.”

Space Tweeps, I need your help!

2009-11-28T19:03:00.001-08:00

I really like my NaNoWriMo novel this year. It's set on Mars, for crying out loud! And I think it's a fun story. But I know it's absolutely riddled with scientific errors (I confused Olympus Mons and Tharsis at one point *doh!*)

So I have an offer for you! I have a complete PDF of my story, and I will send the file to any Space Tweep (or general space geek) who DM's me (@joi_the_artist on Twitter). It's 358 pages of Mars-soaked awesomeness, for free! All I ask is that you keep track of your comments on the scientific errors, and send them to me when you finish the story so that I can correct them for a second draft of the book.

DM me! I want readers, and you know you want to read the story of Dejah Sorenson, the woman who brought the Mars Phoenix Lander home!

nano post 58

2009-11-25T10:01:00.000-08:00

Year Twenty Fifty Two

for the first few hours, Dejah relished the feeling of walking across the face of Mars, unemcumbered by the hab tent. She felt lighter, as if she could take a few running steps, and launch into the air, and simply fly to the Phoenix.

But after a few hours of walking, the monotony of the landscape set in. It was still beautiful, she thought, there was just so damn much of it that looked like the rest.

The ground was littered with rocks, and she had to watch her footing to make sure that she didn't trip over a loose stone. One rip in the exploration suit, and it would all be over. No ship could get to her in time, and a patch would only stop the air from escaping for a few hours.

Step. Step. Step. The rythym of her footsteps was inescapable, and Dejah found her thoughts falling into the rythym as well. She shivered with the cold as the sun skimmed the horizon. She could see a field of stars in the sky to her right, but tried not to look at it. It made her feel even colder, and out here,. To be cold was to move slowly. Moving slowly was death.

She picked up her pace again, grateful for the food pouches she'd eaten earlier. The energy from the extra food was welcome.

When the sun reached its highest point, still barely above the horizon, Dejah decided to risk stopping for a moment. She pulled up her maps on the wrist comm. Still twenty kilometers away, she thought with frustration. No way to make it to the site today, and perhaps not even the next day, depending on how quickly she was able to make time over the ground.

“Well, at least I don't have to stop tonight,” she said, “gotta keep moving.”

Step. Step. Step.

Year Twenty Fifty Two

“Alright, I want to roll out of here right after sunrise tomorrow,” Dejah commented, surveying the two rigs. They had been loaded and packed over the last few weeks, and the supplies had been tied down to prevent shifting. “So tomorrow, I expect to see everyone here at five sharp. I'd recommended spending a little time in the gym, too, since it'll be a while before we get a good workout. We're going to be spending an awful lot of time in those rigs, so stretch while you can.”

She looked at the clock. “It's already seven o'clock, and I think we've got everything ready to go for tomorrow. You guys go home, eat a good dinner, and get as much sleep as you can. Let's all be rested, ready to go, and at the top of our games tomorrow.”

Thomas and Eduardo nodded, and the group dispersed. Dejah stood in the open door of the warehouse, looking out across the sunset landscape, watching as the colors slowly changed from peaches and salmons to deep purples and blacks. The stars came out, easily visible through the Dome.

“finally time,” she heard behind her, and turned to see Kruiser cleaning a large wrench with a rag.

“Yeah,” she commented laconically.

“Seems weird that it's actually here. Sometimes the prep begins to feel more real than the actual mission.”

She laughed, and nodded. “Yeah. It's pretty weird. If everything goes well, in about six weeks, I'll be back in Spirit City. I'm really going to miss this place. I'll miss the energy, the...I don't know what to call it. That thing that tells you to toss the safety precautions and just go for what it is that needs to be done.”

He grinned, and set the wrench in a nearby tool box. “Insanity.”

“I think determination is more what I was looking for, but that works too.” She looked out at the sky for a minute longer. “I need to get going. I need to get some sleep before we head out tomorrow.”

Kruiser nodded. “I'll be here to see you off. Just in case something goes wrong, which it will because it always does.”

She laughed, and waved goodnight before heading out into the night of the domed city. It was cold, and she stuck her hands into her pockets to keep them warm. The stars were bright overhead.

“I can't believe it's time already,” she breathed as she walked up the steps to the apartment. She began to scan her ident to unlock the door, then pulled back.

She sat on the walkway, with her back to the door, and looked up at the stars again.

Pressing a number on her comm pad, she heard it beep several times before a voice came on the other end.

“Dej?”

“Hey Nathan. The mission rolls out of here tomorrow, and I just wanted to call...you know...to say goodbye for a while. I'll be out of reach on the mission, gotta keep the comm channels clear for official business.”

“Wow...tomorrow, huh? That seems...quick.”

“Yeah, almost seems like just the other day I was back in Spirit City. I'll be back in about five or six weeks; we've got two and a half weeks to get there and back, and then I've just got to finish up some things here, get packed, all of that kind of thing.”

“Must be strange to think about coming back here after that,” Nathan said. “You've been living along for nearly two years now, it'll probably take some adjustment to get used to being in the same house again.”

Dejah agreed, and the conversation fell into an uneasy silence. She looked up, eyes fixed on the stars.

“Nathan?”

“Yeah?”

“What time is it where you are?”

“About...six in the morning. Why?”

“Can you see the stars?”

He paused. “Let me check.” She heard him opening the door of the house. “It's starting to get light, but there's still a few out.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Will you sit and watch the stars with me? They won't be the same stars, but it will at least be the same sky.”

“I...sure.”

The silence returned, but it no longer felt so empty.

Dejah awoke a few minutes before the alarm went off, and lay in bed for a moment, trying to convince herself that the day had finally arrived. It seemed unreal, as if it was just another day of workouts, sims, and time lines.

Finally, the alarm blared and she rolled out of bed. She had cleaned the apartment the night before, and had been assured that someone would be by to check on things every few days while she was gone. She ate a quick breakfast, and pulled on the thick jacket that she intended to take on the mission.

The walk to the Dandelion building was cold; the sky behind Olympus was beginning to lighten, but it would be hours before the sun would move out from behind the massive peak. She broke into a light jog, trying to warm herself without getting sweaty. There wasn't time for a shower before departure this morning, and showers on the road would be impossible.

When she arrived at the warehouse, the large exit doors were already open, and a single light was on, but most of the building was lost in shadows.

The rigs were parked just inside the doors, and she saw that the cargo doors were open. She grabbed a handhold on one of the rigs, and swung up into it. The cargo area was full almost to capacity. A rover was chained into place near the door of the cargo area, and boxes of supplies took up most of the floor. She began checking the boxes against the packing list that she had brought, but soon heard the other team members come into the warehouse. She jumped down, and made her way over to them.

“Hey, everyone.”

Eduardo turned and flashed a grin at her. “Dej! I was beginning to wonder where you were. What did you do, sleep in one of the rigs?”

She laughed, and shook her head. “No, I just got here early and was double checking the packing list. It all looks good, I think we're ready to go.”

Dejah looked around at the three men, suddenly aware of the importance of the mission before them. She cleared her throat.

“Well, guys, here we are. We're about to get in the rigs and head out on a mission that may very well be the most important thing that any of us will ever do. We've trained for this as hard as we could for two years, and there's nothing more to be done but head out of the Dome and go do what we've been practicing all of this time.”

She paused, and hesitated before continuing. “This may sound a little bit overblown, but they're right when they say that this is the end of an era. After we bring back the Phoenix, there are no more probes, landers, or rovers to find. After this, Mars starts its own time. We take our place as true Aresians; grateful for the Terran efforts that landed humanity here, but moving forward in our own direction, with nothing to hold us back. It's appropriate then, that this is the Phoenix. In legend, the Phoenix was a bird that lived for five hundred years; when the time came for it to die, it built a pyre of spices and set itself afire. As the flames burned, the phoenix would begin to sing a song of incredible beauty. When nothing was left but ashes, a new Phoenix would arise from the ashes. Well, Earth built us a beautiful pyre here, on this cinnamon dusted world. We're going to set this world alight, and see the new world of Aresians rise out of the ashes of the old one. It's time to strike that match. Let's roll!”

Eduardo looked slightly surprised at the speech, but Thomas applauded quietly, and Kruiser grinned.

“Ok, Thomas, why don't you take the Ferris, and Eduardo and I will take the Flint. I'd rather have you be our solo driver, since you're still the most experienced.”

She turned to go, and saw Kruiser standing by, watching the preperations. “Hey, Kruiser. We're gonna miss you out there.”

“Ah, you'll be fine. Those engines are in better shape than they've been since they rolled off the assembly lines. You've got a supply of filters that would last you for two months, and you're insanely well prepared. Almost wish I was going with you, except for the little fact that you're all insane and I like staying where there's air to breathe.”

Dejah laughed, and he grinned. “Seriously, good luck, and get me on the comm if you run into any kind of mechanical trouble. Mental, spiritual, or grammatical trouble, and you're all the hell on your own.”

“Understood,” she replied with a smile.

Thomas stepped up into the cab of the Ferris, and shut the door, checking the seals that would keep out the blowing sand and poisonous atmosphere. Dejah glanced around the warehouse one last time, and pulled herself into the passenger seat of the rig.

Eduardo climbed into the driver's seat. “What, you're not driving? I thought for sure you'd want to be the one driving as we make our way out to the last great adventure.”

She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, and checked the seals of the door. “Nah, I think I'd rather watch for now. Besides, I heard that there's a whole crowd waiting by the airlock, and I think I'll let you be the one to risk doing something stupid in front of the news cameras.”

He laughed, and started the engine. It roared to life, and Dejah could feel the entire frame vibrating as the vehicle slowly moved forward. The sky was brighter, but the landscape was still in the shadow of Olympus.

The rigs moved slowly through the outskirts of the city on their way to the airlock; Dejah looked at the city, still half asleep, with scattered lights dotting the red landscape.

Then the wall of the Dome filled the windshield, curving upward slightly. A crowd of people were waiting beside the entrance to the airlock. Dejah craned her neck to see the faces passing by outside the window. There was Scott, she thought, and Carter. Then Charles, Kim, and the other researches from the museum. Then hundreds of people she didn't know, and had never seen.

Dejah could see the Ferris move into the airlock, and watched as the Flint moved to follow it. The thick clear tube covered the two rigs, and she heard the lock swing closed behind them. The air wooshed back into the Dome, and the outside gate opened. The rigs rolled steadily forward, and Dejah looked in the mirror and saw the outside lock close behind them.

“Alright, we are clear of the Dome,” she called over the comm. “I am marking the start of the mission in the log, and we are on our way.”

Dejah let her eyes roam, straying over the landscape outside as the rigs made their way across the Tharsis plateau, towards the eastern edge where the land sloped easily and passage to the surface of the planet was more accessible.

The land rolled by slowly but steadily, and sooner than she would have thought possible, the Dome of the city was far behind, slipping under the horizon with every passing kilometer.

The comm hissed, and they heard Thomas' voice. “Alright you guys, assuming a sixteen hour day, we can make about three hundred kilometers a day in these rigs, assuming level ground. We'll lose a little time coming down off of Tharsis tonight, so let's plan on camping at the base of the Bulge, ok?”

“Sounds good to me, Thomas, you're the expert on the rigs. That still keeps us well within our time line, correct?” Dejah called out.

“Oh yeah, it's pretty much where we planned on stopping, just wanted to confirm. Better enjoy this landscape while it's still exciting—it's going to take us a week just to get to the Phoenix, and you're going to get bored of flat and red long before then.”

“Speak for yourself, Thomas,” she grinned. Eduardo laughed, keeping his eyes on the ground ahead.

“Oh, you'll get tired of it, trust me. It's impossible not to, it's all so alike in the end. I've brought books with me on long term missions before, just because it gets so dull, driving all day. Although, granted, this one's going to be a little trickier, since we're setting out before sunrise and driving after dark. I'm still not real comfortable with that, but these rigs have got the best lights available, so we should be fine.” He patted the wheel affectionately, and shifted to a more comfortable position.

“Need me to take over?” Dejah asked.

“Nah, I'm good for another hour. We'll switch then.”

She shrugged and agreed.

The rigs made their way to the bottom of the gentle slope, and stopped. Dejah could only see a few meters ahead in the rigs lights, but the instruments showed a flat expanse, stretching away to the horizon for as far as she could see.

“That's got Tharsis behind us,” commented Eduardo, unbuckling his harness.

Dejah let her hands rest on the wheel. The navigtion down the slope had been slightly tense for her, and she felt an ache in her hands from gripping the steering wheel too tightly for too long. She flexed her fingers, then hit the release button on her own harness, and stood up, stretching her arms and back as much as was possible in the cramped space.

“Hey guys, we need to decide if we're spending the night in the rigs, or if we want to set up a couple of the hab tents. Tents will probably be more comfortable, but I'm not sure that I want to use those unless we have to. We don't have very many spare filters for them, and the rigs will be completely safe.” Dejah felt a sudden wave of exhaustion wash over here—no matter how many times you ran a sim, she thought, the mental exhaustion is the one thing you can never imitate.

“I think we should go ahead and stay in the rigs,” Thomas commented. Dejah could see him through the windshield of the Ferris, illuminated by the instrument lights. He smiled and waved.

“I agree,” Eduardo said. “We've got fully stocked food pantries in both, and there should be room to lay down. You're gonna be a little more comfortable, though.”

Dejah rolled her eyes. “Oh come on, it's not like I take up that much space.” She stepped behind the seats of the cab; there was a small platform, designed to be a sleeping space. “See, there's plenty of space here.” She pulled a thin mat out of a compartment, and spread it on the ground.

“Hey, don't go getting ahead of yourself,” Eduardo said, coming around to the sleeping space. “You go to sleep without having something to eat first and you're going to wake up hungry in the middle of the night.” He rummaged through a small compartment, and tossed her a food pouch. “I think the heating thing is over here, sorry. Hand it back and I'll put it in.”

Dejah shook her head, and ripped open the pouch. She settled into a cross legged position on the mat, and squeezed some of the contents of the pouch into her mouth. “Nope, I am too tired to wait. I'm just gonna eat it this way.” She swallowed, and pounded her chest. “Whoa. I should slow down, I think that went down the wrong way.”

“If you choke on a food pouch on our first night out, I will never forgive you. I will mock your ghost with empty pouches.” Eduardo pulled out his dinner from the heater, and winced as the hot packet burned his fingertips. “damn.”

“And if you injure your hand on a hot food packet the first night out, I will never let you forget it. Your children's children would be known by the name Hotfingers.”

He laughed, and tore open the pouch, releasing a cloud of steam.

nano post 57

2009-11-25T10:00:00.002-08:00

Year Twenty Fifty Two

The knife ripped through the tent, and Dejah blinked in the bright shaft of light that drifted into the tent. She widened the opening, wishing that she was tall enough to peek out of it.

The weight of the sand against the hab tent wall caused the fabric to pop as the fibers seperated slowly. It wouldn't hold much longer now, she thought.

She'd rolled up the blankets and tried standing on them to gain some height from which to pull herself through the opening, but the material simply collapsed under her weight.

“Alright, we're gonna do this the hard way then,” she said. The opening ripped further, and a few particles of sand drifted in.

She checked the seals on her suit for the final time, and stepped under the opening. She placed her hands on either side, and gripped the tent fabric. With a leap, she forced her shoulders through the opening and out into the air.

For a moment, she thought she'd made it. Then the fabric gave way underneath her, and she tuimbled back into the tent, sand pouring down in a torrent.

Dejah scrambled out from under the heavy stream, and looked up. The opening was growing wider, and easier to reach, but the sand was pouring in at an alarming rate. She watched the stream, judging the distance, then took a step forward onto the sand and launched herself upward again, clawing at the dust that had drifted outside the tent.

It was like trying to swim upstream, she thought frantically as she clawed at the shifting soil, trying to find the surface. The dust covered her helmet, sliding off rapidly only to be replaced by more of the red soil.

She pulled herself forward slowly, fighting for every inch, and finally found herself outside the tent, ankles still inside the opening, and looked backward. With the loss of integrity to the tent's frame, the structure hadn't lasted long. Dust filled the floor of the tent, and the other walls had caved in, the fabric of the walls and ceiling giving way under the weight.

Dejah got to her feet, and looked around. The landscape was more rugged here than it had been during the earlier stages of her trip, but it was still mostly level.

Dejah took a step forward, then another. “Just you and me now,” she said to the world beneath her feet. “Just you and me.”

Year Twenty Fifty One

“Alright, we've got eight months before departure,” Dejah said to Eduardo and Thomas one morning, looking over the time line for training. “Here's what we still need to do. We need to clock a lot more time driving the actual rigs on the range. We've been practicing with the rovers, and I think we're solid there, but Thomas is still the only decent rig driver. Eduardo, your extrication scenarios have been great, but I think we can scale them back now. Let's say one every two weeks, just to keep us sharp, alright? Besides, we'll be needing you on the obstacle course with the rigs from now on.”

He nodded, and Dejah continued. “Thomas, I want you to start thinking about running more long term sims for the rigs. We're going to be spending about sixteen hours a day in those things for two weeks just getting there, and I'd prefer it if we were used to it by the time we left the Dome. Put together some twenty four hour sims, a couple of thirty six hours, and one for forty eight. Oh, and let's take the rigs out for a few days in the field, too. No extrication scenarios, just us and the vehicles. Simulators are great, but let's add some variety, huh?”

They agreed, and went their seperate ways to focus on the tasks at hand. Dejah saw Kruiser filling out a form by the rigs and wandered over. He glanced up and saw her approach, but didn't stop writing. “You know who's making the real money on Mars?” he asked. “the damn air filter companies. It's not the water companies, or the mining folks. It's the damn air filters.” he jabbed the pen at the clipboard. “This is the third request I've had to make in a month for refills for the rovers, and that's not counting the filters for the rigs, shuttles, transports...” He shook his head. “Crazy, that's what it is.”

Dejah laughed, and leaned up against a table. “I'm probably about to give them even more money.” She quickly outlined the plan for the rig training that Thomas would be doing. “So we'll be doing a lot of field work for a while, and those filters are going to need checking every time we come back. I thought you might want to know.”

the mechanic nodded. “Yeah, thanks for telling me. I'll play around with my schedule, try to do most of my other work when you guys are out playing in the dirt. Just get me a copy of the training schedule, and i'll see what I can do.”

Dejah nodded, and started to walk away, then turned back to Kruiser. “Why did you come to Mars?”

“Now that's an easy one,” he said, signing the form and hanging the clipboard on the wall. “I came to Mars because when I was your age, this was the only free place left in the solar system. Earth hasn't had a really free country in fifty years, and the lunar colonies are just an extension of that. But the governments thought Mars was too complicated to mess with, so they would make the occasional U.N. Pronouncement, which had exactly as much effect here as pissing into Mareneris. Not too much crime here; people were just trying to survive. When it did crop up, it was dealt with. If you were a crazy twenty year old kid, you could come up here and make your own way without having to ask anyone for anything. I just hopped a shuttle to Bradbury, grabbed a piece of land and put up a little shack. Wasn't much, just concrete blocks, but it worked. Got a job working on engines for one of the companies, and just made it work.” He grinned suddenly, and she noticed that his greying beard was streaked with red dust. “Also, Mars looks a hell of a lot like Arizona, and I guess it just always felt like home.”
As Dejah unlocked her door, her communicator beeped. She set her bag down, and looked at the information screen: Nathan calling.

“Hey hon, this is an early call for you. What is it, five in the morning there? Is something wrong?”

“No,” he said, stifling a yawn, “I just checked my comm records, turns out I hadn't heard from you in about three weeks. Guess you must be pretty busy over there.”

“It's pretty crazy,” she replied, picking up her mail off the floor and sorting through it. “Only eight months out, so we're busier than ever running sims, and the PR department has me doing a ton of interviews and stuff.”

“Yeah, I caught the first one on ISSN, I thought it was pretty good. You looked a little uncomfortable, I guess the spotlight really isn't your thing.”

Dejah felt a slight buzz of irritation, but ignored it. “Not really. I just want them to leave me alone to do my work. It's still better than the office in Spirit City, though. How's your work coming? Have you had anyone interested in your cathedral design?”

“Not in building the cathedral itself, but that's not surprising. A lot of people have liked the basic design, though, so I've gotten some work from that.”

“Well, that's good!” Dejah said brightly, wondering how to continue the conversation. An uncomfortable silence fell for a few moments, then Nathan said awkwardly, “I miss you. Sure wish you'd visit once in a while.”

“I can't leave my crew right now, Nathan,” she sighed. “It's a twelve hour shuttle ride, at best, and I'd have to be gone for several days to make the trip worth it. But you could always come here, you know.”

“I don't think i'd really fit in that world, Dej,” he said. “Too busy, too...driven...for me. I like a city that can relax a little, leave some room for art, you know?”

No, you wouldn't fit in here, thought Dejah wearily, but I do. Another awkward silence stretched. “I'll be back in less than a year,” Dejah said, trying to sound positive. “Once the mission is over, I'll just have a few things to finish here, then I'll hop the next shuttle to Spirit City.”

there was silence on the other end for a moment, and Dejah was beginning to think that the connection had been lost, when Nathan finally replied. “Are you really going to come back, though, Dej?”

“Nathan! I promised you I'd come back!”

“But you didn't promise to stay,” he reminded her.

The weeks continued to pass quickly. Dejah, Eduardo, and Thomas ran simulation after simulation, preparing for every possibility. Several trips lasted a day or more, and Dejah returned to her apartment exhausted after every excursion. She found less and less time for the gym, but the hours on the gymnastics and weight training equipment had made her body quick, strong, and repsonsive, ready for anything.

Six weeks before the scheduled departure date, Dejah walked into the warehouse, holding a clipboard with several sheets of paper.

“Alright everyone, it's starting to get close now. I have here--” she held up the clipboard-- “the list of things that we will need to have packed on the rigs before we start. Some of it we can do right away, some of it will need to wait until the day gets closer. I say, do what we can, when we can. Things that can be done today, or at any rate, sometime this week, are as follows: hab tents—they're prepackaged and ready to go, we just need to store them on board. One for each of us. Chains, ropes, shovels, anything we think we might use to get the Phoenix out. We should already have them on the rigs, but I want someone to check every square centimeter, and make sure that nothing needs to be replaced. The last thing we want is one of those snapping when the Phoenix is over our heads, right? Let's try to avoid any obvious errors. Thomas, do you mind checking those for me? Great. The food pouches are going to be available soon, but I'd like to wait until we're about two weeks out before getting those onboard. Oh, and we need two rovers on board, one for each rig, Eduardo, can you check with Kruiser to see which two are in the best repair and have him get them prepped for the ride? I think that's everything that can be done this week. Eduardo, other than helping me load the rigs, what is on your plan for the week?”

Eduardo adjusted his grimy ballcap, and thought for a moment. “Well, I have another extrication scenario I'm working on. It's pretty important—i want to run at least one where we have to worry about avoiding frost. I know, we're scheduled to get there at least two weeks before that's a problem, but I'd just like to be sure. Other than that...I need to clock in some more time on the course, I'm still not comfortable turning that rig at top speed.”

Dejah nodded, and made a note on her schedule. “Thomas?”

He cleared his throat. “Well, it's going to take me a while to check those chains and cables. Probably two, maybe three days, longer if we have to replace any of them. I'd like to watch both of you put the rigs through the obstacle course again—we haven't done that in about two weeks, and we should probably brush up on your driving skills at least once a week.”

“Sounds fair to me. Alright guys, looks like we have a lot to get done this week, but I'm confident that we can take care of it. Only six more weeks!”

Thomas gave a faint cheer, and Eduardo whooped and clapped his hands together eagerly. Dejah leaned against a nearby table, and began scheduling when the rest of the items for the trip could be stowed aboard the rigs. She looked at the two large vehicles that had been chosen for the trip.

The rigs were large, as big as medium sized construction equipment, and built to withstand anything Mars could throw at them. They had a thick outer metal shell, composed of an alloy that flexed instead of cracking when the freezing winters came. Tiny heating filaments snaked through the chassis, keeping it warm enough to prevent fracture. The windows were made of a strong, flexible plastic, clear as glass and as tough as steel. They could each carry several tons of cargo, and were generally stocked with chains, cables, rovers, and everything that an exploration team might need in case of deep sand, dust drifts, or other difficulties. On the side of each worn vehicle was a small black silhouette of a rhinoceros, with the words MarsRhino stencilled beneath it. Dejah patted the logo affectionately; MarsRhino Machines made the best rigs and rovers in the solar system, and the logo was recognized as the unimpeachable seal of quality. Each of the rigs was given a call number to use over the comms, but each had also been given a nickname, which was generally used by all of the employees on the Dandelion site. One of the rigs for the Phoenix mission was called Ferris; the other, Flint.

Good names, she thought. Solid.
Her comm beeped.

“Sorenson here.”

“Hello, Dejah! Scott here, at the front desk. How are you today?”

She smiled. “I'm good, Scott, just busy. What can I help you with?”

“there's a young man here from Mars Heritage who would like to speak with you.”

“Well, tell him that the progress report isn't due until tomorrow, and he can rest assured that I will have it in on time.”

There was a muttered conference on the other end of the comm, then Scott spoke again. “I'm sorry, but he says that it's not about the progress report. He'd like to see you in person.”

“He's going to have to come out here. I'm in the middle of planning out the next few weeks.”

“He says that will be fine, and he'll be there in five minutes.”

“Alright. Thanks, Scott.”

“anytime, Dejah!”

She sighed, and looked out the open warehouse door, and across to the wall of the Dome. Just out there, she thought, just out there is freedom, a wide open view, and...the surface of Mars.

“Six more weeks,” she whispered to the rig. “Six more weeks, and they can't hold us back any longer.”

A small vehicle pulled up outside the warehouse door, and she saw a young man get out of the passenger's side door. He wasn't dressed in a suit, like so many of the interviewers and managers she'd met in the past two years. He wore ordinary street clothes, and a pair of sunglasses that seemed oddly incongruent on his young face.

“Scout Sorenson, I presume?” he asked, sticking out a hand. She shook it reluctantly.

“That's me. What can I help you with today?”

He smiled. “Actually, we'd like to do a little something for you. I'm from the curator's department of the new museum. We had to be a little sneaky to keep this away from the PR department, or they'd want to tag along and stick a microphone in your face the whole time.”

Dejah shook her head. “I'm sorry, during what whole time?”

“See, I knew I was going to mess this up! This is why I'm in research, not PR. The museum staff, the ccurators, researchers, everyone, would like to take you on a tour of the museum. A private tour, no press, no PR. We want you to see the home that you'll be bringing the Phoenix back to.”

She raised an eyebrow. “No interviewers?”

“Not a one.”

“You're not going to record the whole thing to send to Terran classrooms?”

“I don't think any of us even knows how to operate the video function on our comm cameras.”

“No reporters, writing about how this is a 'historic moment,' 'the end of an age'?”

He grinned. “You can go through the museum alone, if you like. Though I think that would disappoint the others in the research department, they've been dying to meet you.”

A slow smile spread across her face. “I think I can rearrange my schedule. But can I ask my team to come, too? They've worked their butts off for this mission.”

“Sure, go right ahead, we'd love to meet them as well!”

She punched the group number into her comm. “Hey, Eduardo, Thomas, Kruiser, everybody get on this channel.” She heard a series of clicks as they connected.

“Listen, we've just gotten an invite to get a tour of the new Heritage museum, and go see where they're gonna put the Phoenix. No press, no interviews, just meeting the research team and taking a look at the museum. Who's in?”

“Not me,” Eduardo said. “Museums are too quiet, they give me the creeps. I might check it out when it's open in a few months though.”

“Thomas?”

“Sorry, Dej, I think I'd rather just get some work done around here.”

“Kruiser?”

“Hell yeah! I want to see where this pile of junk is gonna go once you get it hauled back here. I'm elbow deep in an engine at the moment, though, so I'm gonna need about ten minutes to clean up and make myself presentable.”

“Alright, just come over when you can.” The comm clicked as the call disconnected.

“Just the four of you?” commented the young man from the museum.

“Just us four. And only three are actually going out on the field; Kruiser's our mechanic. He makes sure everything runs, but we're not his only project, so he's got to stay here. Besides, the grant money is good, but not enough for training a fourth person for the whole two years. By the way, I don't think you ever told me your name.”

He slapped the heel of his hand against his forehead. “See? I keep doing these things. I'm Charles Stroupe.”

“good to meet you, Charles. I was beginning to wonder if all of the Heritage people were like the dopes i've met so far. No offense.”

He laughed. “No, that's a fair assessment of the PR office. Really, they're a very small but necessary part of what we do. I wish you could meet the advocates, but they're usually out in the field.”

“The field? You've got your own scouts?”

“Oh, no! Sorry, when I say 'the field,' I mean domes, cities, colonies, even Terra. Our advocates give talks about Mars, the history of our exploration, and the importance of preserving at least some parts of it, so that future generations can get to know the Red Planet that we all fell in love with. They're neat people,. Very passionate. You'd like them.”

“I bet I would.”

She heard steps on the concrete floor, and turned to see Kruiser walking quickly towards them. “Ok, I'm here, let's get this show on the road, huh?”

Charles gestured toward the waiting vehicle. In a few moments, the transport was speeding towards the city.

The museum was larger than she had expected. It vaguely resembled a Grecian temple; the main building was set on a small hill, with a wide flight of steps leading upwards towards the entrance. At the top of the steps, where the path into the museum began, there was a large pedestal, reminiscent of the Spirit memorial at the University.

As Dejah climbed the steps, she squinted, and held up a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. She didn't recognize the bulky shape atop the monument; as they approached, she could see an engraved stone at the front of the monument, and stopped to read it:

Viking I

Here we reached out
Here we touched another world
Here began a New World

“Is that the real Viking Lander?” dejah asked in amazement. “That's incredible, I thought it was recovered in terrible condition, after being exposed on the surface for so long.”

Charles nodded. “Oh, it was. There's an exhibit inside about the whole restoration process, and you can see some of the pictures there. Our restoration department is one of the best in the whole solar system—there are museums on Earth that would kill to have them on the payroll. We can't pay even half as much as some of those museums, but they just love working here. Love getting their hands on those old landers. So they work for a lot less than they could.”

Dejah couldn't take her eyes off of the lander, and reached up a hand toward it. “Can I touch it?”

Charles laughed, and nodded. “Of course. We've got a protective coating on there,, and touching it won't do any harm.”

She brushed her fingers across the surface of the lander, feeling the chill as she came into contact with the cold metal. As with the Spirit, the dish of the lander had been positioned facing outward and upward, as if still transmitting a signal back.”

“you know, the only mission to ever beat her, until the colonists came, was Opportunity.” he shook his head in amazment. “Gets me every time.”

Kruiser was walking around the pedestal, looking at the relic from several different angles. “You gotta respect a piece of machinery like that. People want to get all crazy over artificial intelligence and thinking machines, but they forget about these things.” He slapped the side of the pedetal in appreciation. “You tell one of these what to do, and it does it. No questions, no secodn guessing. Gotta love that simplicity.”

Dejah grinned. “you'd kill for a machine that always did what you told it, wouldn't you?”

“Damn straight I would.”

Charles beckoned them to the museum's main entrance.

The red stone building lay low and close to the ground, but over the doorway rose a large arch. They passed under it, and entered the building.

Dejah blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dimmer light in the building. The main doors opened onto a wide but shallow lobby: the far wall was a large mural. Mars was shown in full, the western hemisphere on the left, and the eastern one on the right. Small doors were located in the lower left and right corners of the mural: over the left door was written “An Ancient World,” while the inscription over the right one read “A New World.”

“This is, of course, to stress the two things that Mars Heritage is really all about: preserving the Red Planet that inspired all of us to come here in the first place, and yet honoring all of the effort that it took to get us here, where we are beginning to carve out a place for ourselves. It's a delicate balance, so we want to make people aware of the great natural history that Mars has had, without losing the pride in the fact that we're here now.” Charles looked at the mural, and Dejah could tell that he was proud of the work that had been done.

“Where should we start?” Dejah asked. “Ancient world, I presume?”

Charles nodded. “That would be the best place to start for a first visit. Of course, feel free to take things in whatever order you'd like. I do have one request though: let me take you to the Phoenix exhibit last.”

Dejah and Kruiser both agreed, and Charles held the door open as they passed through.

The walls were dotted with small luminous stars, and the floor had been modeled to resemble the Martian soil. In the center of the room was a large globe, made of polished red stone. Dejah walked over to it, and ran a finger across it, setting it spinning slowly on its axis. The polar caps were some sort of irridescent white stone, she realized, and as her fingers trailed across the surface, she could feel the various major features of the world. That deep crack was Marineris, and that finger-jarring bump was Olympus.

She looked around at the rest of the room. There was a flatscreen monitor showing an animation of the fbeginnings of the galaxy, the solar system, and finally the formation of the planet mass and geological features. It seemed to be on a loop, and Dejah turned away again after watching it through a few times.

A series of slabs of rock were inset into another wall, and she saw labels beneath. Different types of rock found on the planet, she realized, and let her hand trail across one of the slabs, feeling the texture across her palm. “Feels good to actually be able to touch something like this without gloves on,” she commented, and kruiser nodded.

Dejah took an hour to explore the Ancient World section of the museum. It was impressive, she decided. Not quite a true museum, perhaps, more like a discovery center, like the places she'd enjoyed as a child, but perfect for conveying a basic knowledge and appreciation of the planet and its features.

“I guess we're ready for the next section,” Dejah commented, turning to Charles. “Is there a way to get there, or do we have to make our way back through this exhibit?”

“Oh no, that would be a traffic flow nightmare. I think you'll like this.” He pushed open a door that read “Per Aspera Ad Astra.”

“You know, I see that phrase a lot,” Kruiser muttered, following them through the door, “but everyone seems to forget that we're still circling the same damn star we've always been.”

“Oh come on,” Dejah teased, “it's just poetry.”

“Yeah, well, there's nothing wrong with poetry getting the facts straight.”

They found themselves in a small hallway. Scores of small lines lit up across one wall, and Dejah saw that they were labeled. “Mariner 4,” “Mariner 9,” “Mars 2,” “Mars 3,” “Viking 1,” “Viking 2,”and many more. The lines snaked down the hall, luring them onward. Tiny images of the various missions dotted the lines here and there. Dejah touched the tiny spaceship that read “Sparrow: first colonists,” and thought for a moment about the crater cathedral that Nathan had shown her. Here was the ship that carried the man who built it.

At the end of the hall, Mars was emblazoned on the door that lead to the next section of the museum. Dejah could see the domes and habs marked clearly on the surface as she passed through the door.

The first room, like the first room of the Ancient World section, was painted to resemble a starry sky, but instead of being filled with small exhibits, the space was given over to models of the first probes to be sent into Aresian space. Dejah smiled as she recognized many of the missions, and tried to name them all. Kruiser peppered Charles with questions about the technical specs of the models—all of the original orbiters and probes were gone, either lost to deep space, or having burned up on entry into the Martian atmosphere. The replicas, Charles informed her, were based on the records of the old space agencies, and were as accurate as possible.

The next room was similar in concept. The floor looked like the dusty Martian surface, and the walls were painted to imitate a sunny day late in the year, before witner began to set in. On one side of the room, the Spirit rover looked up from the dusty pit where it had finally gotten stuck, after nearly six years on the surface. On the other side of the room, the rover Opportunity sat perched on a mound of soil and rocks, looking as if she might move again at any moment and begin sending data down to the Terran agencies again. Eight years, Dejah thought in amazement. Eight years, and it was only supposed to run for ninety sols.

“Of course, these are only replicas,” Charles commented. “The real Spirit is in Spirit City at the University, and the real Opportunity is in Opportunity City. But having the original rovers available, we were able to recreate them in incredible detail, down to the scratches and scrapes.”

Several other rovers and landers were present in the tableau, but it was obvious who the stars of the show were.

Dejah heard footsteps, and turned around to see a young woman enter the room. Her skin and hair were dark, and she seemed slightly nervous. Charles waved at he. “Oh, good! Dejah Sorenson, I'd like you to meet Doctor Kim Wideman, one of our restorers. Kim, are the others coming.” The young woman nodded, and flashed a shy smile at Dejah as she reached out a hand.

“It's a great pleasure to meet you, Scout Sorenson. We've been following the progress of the mission since you were announced as the leader of the retrieval team.”

Dejah shook her hand. “It's good to meet you! Oh, this is Kruiser, he's a member of my team. He keeps our machines in top shape she we can get out there and back as quickly as possible. So, Doctor Wideman, you're going to be working on the Phoenix to get her ready for the big day?”

Kim smiled and nodded. “Yes, and I can't wait! I missed the chance to work on either rover, and this is my last chance to restore one of the major missions.”

“I know how you feel,” Dejah said.

The group moved into the next room, and Dejah could see that this was where the Phoenix would eventually be placed, once it was no longer the star exhibit. Here was the Mars Science Lab, Curiousity, poised to take a sample of a nearby rock. On the other side was the Ambition, and digging itself into the soil was the Cicada, the first drilling robot to land on the planet.

Another couple of researchers came into the room, and introductions were made again. Dejah, Kruiser, and the others slowly made their way through the rest of the rooms; Dejah noticed that the mechanic seemed highly interested in the restoration process, painstakingly documented in videos and photos, and displayed in a large room.

The doorway to the final chamber was covered by plastic sheeting, and Charles paused in front of it. “This is it, Dejah. In time, this room will be a simple exhibit room, for travelling exhibits, or items of interest. But for the first full year of the museum, this is where the Phoenix will make her home. We can't wait to see her here, where she belongs.”

He held back the sheeting, and Dejah ducked inside. The others waited by the door, peeking inside as if to allow her to experience the room alone.

Dejah stepped onto another floor that was made to imitate the Aresian soil. The room was circular, and the walls were a single large screen; a view of the landscape was projected onto them, creating the illusion of standing on the surface of Mars. A small hill was raised at one end of the room, and Dejah could see where the Phoenix would soon be standing, looking proudly out across the landscape.

She felt her heart skip a beat, and moved closer to the display. Her boots crunched on real dust and rocks as she stepped forward. She glanced over her shoulder at Charles, who nodded to her to go on. “It'll be more closed off next time, enjoy it while you can.”

She stood on the top of the hill, and looked across the room. It wasnt' entirely accurate, she knew—the Lander was in a very flat spot, but it did look impressive. As she stood, she felt as if something was moving, and finally realized that the screens were slowly changing, the light shifting.

She watched as a day passed on the screens. Dust devils occasionally danced across the horizon, and the sun slowly sank lower. Soon it was a pale disc just above the horizon, and the red dust began to gleam purple, the shadows a charcoal black.

“I recognize this,” she exclaimed. “It's from that picture, that famous artist's concept. I used to have a print of it hanging in my living room.”

Dejah stood straight, watching as the sun sank below the horizon. Stars came out one by one on the walls, and the room was dark, except for the faint light of the screens. Phobos launched itself up over the horizon and across the sky, followed by tiny Deimos. Then, with a burst of light, Dejah turned to see the sun arc over the far horizon, spreading warm light across the ragged soil and beginning the day anew.

She retreated back down the hill, and rejoined the group, who had stepped into the room. “that's...that's really something,” she commented. “I think the Phoenix is going to like it here.”

“It's where she belongs now,” said one of the young men who had joined the group. “She belongs here, with us. We're here in part because of her, and it's time she came home.” The others nodded. Kim Wideman laid a hand on Dejah's sleeve. “Please bring her home, Scout Sorenson. We've been waiting for her for a long time.”

On the ride back to the Dandelion warehouse, Dejah was silent, lost in thought. She bid Charles goodbye, and thanked him for the tour. She shut the door of the transport, and watched it drive away.

“Hell of a thing,” Kruiser muttered as he went back to the engine he'd been working on.

Dejah pressed a button on her comm. “Hey, Eduardo and Thomas, we're back from the museum. Mind meeting me for a second by the rigs?”

They acknowleged the request, and a few minutes later the team was assembled.

Dejah paced in a tight circle. “I hope you guys don't think I was slacking by going to the museum today. I really wanted to take that opportunity, and I'm glad I did. Those are good people there, and they've built something extraordianry. I got to see where the Phoenix is going to be; it's all set up, or almost set up.”

She paused, and pushed a stray strand of hair back from her face. “Sometimes I think we've spent so much time planning for every little thing that could go wrong that we forget about what's going to happen when we get it right. This is the last of the landers from Earth; it's a machine that did a hell of a job, and is a lot of the reason why we're here at all. We're going out to bring that machine home. We can't let anything stop us from doing that. This is something bigger than we are.”

she looked around the group, meeting their gazes. “I know you know all of this, but I just wanted to say...I just wanted to say that I know this team is the best one for this mission. Now let's get ready to bring the Phoenix home!”

nano post 56

2009-11-25T10:00:00.001-08:00

Nelson handed her a sheet of paper. “Here's the basic script for the interview. Feel free to phrase things your own way, but Dandelion wants to make sure that the right image is presented. This is a system wide broadcast, you know.”

Dejah shifted in her seat. The hard plastic chair looked good on the screen, she assumed, but there was no way to get comfortable in it. She was dressed in an olive green shirt with the Dandelion logo emblazoned on it in a warm white shade, and clean black pants. “We want you to look like you've just come in from the field,” the wardrobe consultant had told her, bypassing the more professional outfits in the dressing room. “But I don't look like this when I come off the field, I'm covered in dust and sweating like a pig.” “Well, this is what they think of when they think of the field, so we're giving it to them,” came the reply.

Dejah looked over at the interviewer, a pleasant faced young woman with dark hair and a red dress suit. She was busy reading her notes, and hadn't looked up in the last fifteen minutes, except to have her lipstick reapplied.

“So, um, did they fly you in all the way from Opportunity?” Dejah asked uncertainly.

The woman looked up, and smiled slightly. “Yes. The station is there, but I fly all over for the interviews.” She turned her eyes back to her script, and Dejah decided not to question her further.

She saw Nelson standing nearby, and waved him over. “Hey! How many of these do I have to do? My team can't run sims without me, every day I'm stuck in an interview is a day we can't work.”

“There really aren't that many, perhaps ten days in all? We've scheduled two and three broadcasts for some days to cut down on the time you take away from the mission training.” he laid a hand on her shoulder, and whispered, “Come on, Ms. Sorenson. These interviews and broadcasts are going to inspire the next generation of explorers. You want others to have the same chance you had, don't you?” He patted her shoulder awkwardly, and retreated.

“Two minutes to air!” one of the cameramen called out, and the interviewer set aside her script.

“Or my sudden and untimely death on the Aresian polar desert will convince them that the age of exploration is finally over,” she muttered.

“One minute!”

She shifted in her chair again, and wished she could block out the bright lights that the studio had set up.

“Thirty seconds!”

the interviewed checked her makeup for a final time, and turned to face Dejah.

“Ten seconds!”

Dejah felt herself starting to sweat, and a bead of perspiration trickled down her back..

“Five! Four! Three!” The last two seconds were ccounted down silently, and the director pointed at the interviewer, who was suddenly smiling an improbably bright smile at Dejah.

“Good evening! This is Tricia Halpert of the Information Solar System Network, coming to you live from Bradbury Dome, where we were fortunate to get an interview with Dejah Sorenson, the scout who had been tasked with the major goal of retrieving the Phoenix Lander. Not only has she promised to get the Phoenix, but she has sworn to get it back in time for the Mars Heritage museum opening! Dejah, what inspired you to go and find the Phoenix?”

Dejah tried not to squint as she gave an inward sigh, and steeled herself to get through the day.

“Good job on the interview, Sorenson,” Nelson said as he escorted her out of the space that the studio was using. “I think we'll have to work on your presence a little bit, but hopefully people will just see that as authenticity.”

“No.”

Nelson turned toward her, wondering if he had misheard. “Excuse me?”

“I said, no.” She stopped walking, and stood, hands on her hips. “I'll do the damn interviews, and the classroom broadcasts. I've agreed to that. But I'm not rehearsing for them. If they don't like me the way I am, that's just tough for them.” she walked away, ignoring his protests, and made her way to the gym.

It was empty, and she quickly changed into her exercise clothes,. Powdering her hands, she looked up at the rings again. She'd been able to make some progress on them, but didn't feel like trying today. No, after the interview, she wanted something that would require physical exertion, but not mental.

She found herself drawn to the wide expanse of the mat, and smiled. “Alright then.”

Dejah stepped onto the mat, and stretched for a moment, feeling the tension begin to drain out of her body. She reached high above her head, then launched herself forrward in a long chain of handsprings. She cartwheeled and spun across the mat, tumbling until her mind was fixed completely on the moment.

Her feet hit the mat, and she came to a stop, breathing hard. “Still here,” she muttered. “Still me. I'm still here.”

A thought struck her, and she quickly ran to the locker room and dressed. She made her way through the building, and out into the warehouse. It was closed for the night, but she scanned her ident badge, and heard the door open.

She saw what she was looking for almost instantly: the line of rovers near one of the smaller doors. She scanned her badge again, registering one of them to her name for a few hours, and drove it out into the night.

The airlock would be closed, she knew, but there were still places in the Dome that one could go to get away. She drove out on the plateau, away from the City.

She pulled the rover to a stop a few hundred meters from the edge of the Dome. It looked like a huge glass wall from there, sloping only slightly as it shot up into the sky.

Dejah got off the rover, and turned her back to the dome,. She lay on the cold sands and looked straight up into the sky, watching the stars slowly turn.

She closed her eyes, and felt the chill of the ground seeping into her body through the suit, and knew she would need to get up soon.

She turned her head, and let a stream of dust run through her fingers. It looked almost purple in the starlight, she realized. The land seemed to stretch away forever, past the dome and out into the night.

“It's still home,” she whispered.

nano post 55

2009-11-25T09:59:00.002-08:00

Year Twenty Fifty Two

Dejah woke, wondering why the wind sounded so much quieter. She looked around, and saw that the sand has risen again, nearly five feet up the wall of the tent. There would only be a little space for the seal to open, and even then she might not be able to work her way free.

Something else was strange, and it took her a moment to realize what it was. Finally, she saw the shadow of her hand on the floor, and realized that the sun was shining through the tent, for the first time in days.

She whooped with excitement and clambered to her feet, ignoring the stiffness that always followed sleeping in the explopration suit.

She grabbed the comm and quickly punched the key for Brabdury dome.

Thomas answered. “Hey Dejah, what's the storm like this morning?”

Eduardo interrupted, “Please tell me that it's finally stopped! The satellite photos indicated less activity in your area, but we havne't been able to tell what the situation is like on the ground yet.”

Dejah laughed. “Well, it hasn't completely stopped, I can still hear the wind sometimes, but it looks like it's stopped piling sand around the tent. I'm going to try to dig my way out today.”

Another voice came on the comm,. “Hey Sorenson, how high is that sand? Your last report said three feet and rising.”

“Hey kruiser. Yeah, that's right. It's up to five feet now. I'm not sure if it's just piled up against the tent or if it's that deep everywhere.”

kruiser was quiet for a minute, and she felt a bead of sweat form between her shoulder blades. “Kruiser?”

“Yeah, Dej, I'm just doing some thinking here. That front seal is what, six feet high?”

she nodded, and replied, “Yes, I think so. Taller than me, anyway, I usually don't open it all the way when I'm getting in or out.”

“Does it open from the bottom or the top?”

Confused, she replied, “The bottom.”

She held the comm away from her ear as the mechanic began swearing loudly, and she heard the metallic clang as he trhew his wrench across the warehouse. “What is it?”

“You're not going to like this, Sorenson,” he replied. “You're going to have to cut through that tent at the top if you want any hope of getting out.”

Thomas and Eduardo began protesting loudly, and she heard Kruiser shouting at both of them, trying to make his argument.

“Hey! Kruiser! I can't cut through the tent, it's the only thing I've got left out here. If I don't have that hab tent, it's just met and Mars, nothing between us but this exploration suit. The little heaters in here aren't enough to handle the cold, and the filters sure as hell can't withstand a storm in the open.”

“You think I don't know that?” he replied angrily, shouting over the other two. “Shut up, you morons, let me finish! Sorenson, it's your only chance. Otherwise you are stuck in that tent, and I don't think those filters will last the two more days it'll take for us to come and find you.”

“No, no they wouldn't. Damn it.” She looked over at the opening of the tent. The top, over the door seal, was a stretch of featureless fabric. It would be tough to cut, especially with the carbon fibers, but she thought her knife could do the job. The weight of the sand would probably expand any small tear she made, she just needed to get the hole started.

“Once I'm out, what's the plan,” she asked calmly.

“You just wait where you are, and we'll get a shuttle out to you. It's going to take us a day to get a crew together to land on the surface and pick you up, so probably two days total.”

she realized what he was saying. “Two days...you mean spendning a night out here, with just the suit.”

He sighed. “Yeah. It's not good. I suppose you could just wait and get out of that tent tomorrow. But if the filters are showing what the info here says, that air is likely going to get poisonous in the next five or six hours. You don't want to be cycling that stuff through the breather in your helmet.”

“No, that would just be asking for trouble, especially over a few days.” She sighd, and looked at the line of sand again.

“Ok, Kruiser, just me what to do, it sounds like you have this under control?”

“Control??” he swore again. “No such thing, kiddo. I just happen to be thinking more clearly than any of you morons at the moment. Alright, first things first. You gotta gather up everything you can carry with you. Especially those mylar blankets. They're not going to be a huge help out there on the sands, but if you put them between yourself and the ground, you might be able to cut some of the chill. Pack up those, I think the tent comes with at least two. Don't bother with the food pouches, you're not going to be able to unseal your helmet to eat them. Eat as many as you can before you cut open the tent, but don't make yourself sick. Now, you're not going to have the high powered tent comm antennae any more, so you're going to have to rely on your wristcomm. I don't know if the signal will hold, but the boys here tell me that they're going to try to get Dandelion to move one of their satellites closer to you, to up the relay power. If you've got any paper, crumple it up and stuff it inside your exploration suit. Probably won't help much, but you never know. Anything that might keep in some body heat is going to help you. I think that's about it. Once you get outside the tent, stay the hell where you are so that the shuttle team can find you.”

Dejah paused in her preperations. Can't the shuttle team find me no matter where I am? The suit GPS is on, and the wristcomm has it, too.”

“Well, sure...” he began, then snapped, “Oh you're not going to do what I think you're going to do, are you? You stupid--! Don't you dare keep pushing toward that damn machine! It is not worth it, just stay put!”

She shook her head, and quickly tore open a food pouch. “Not a chance, Kruiser. It's going to take you a day to get the team together anyway, and I can't be more than two days out. The last known position is twenty seven klicks from here, and I can make that in two days.”

“Two days with a hab tent, Sorenson!” he shouted. “You think you're going to make that kind of time when you can't sleep at night? You're going to have to stay awake the whole time! If you let yourself go to sleep out there, you're not waking up!”

She heard a scuffle on the other end of the comm, then Thomas' voice floated through the tent. “He's right, Dej. You're going to use all of your energy just trying to stay awake and warm through the night. Don't try to go any further, we're coming to get you.”

She finished gulping down the last of the food pouch, and opened another. “Sorry guys. I can't let Dandelion lose that grant money, i'd never live it down.” She added, “And you know, being out here, I've reached a decision. It's not worth it. If I can't get to the Phoenix, I mean. It's not worth being here if I can't leave a mark in the end. It would be all for nothing.”

She paused to drain another food pouch, and Eduardo burst out, “You idiot! We never should have let you push forward when the rigs broke down! If we'd stuck to your plan, we would have called it off, started Plan B then--”

“You couldn't have started it then,” she informed him. “Plan B requires us having a fix on the Phoenix. Then we could send a team down to dig it out and airlift it out, hoping it wouldn't break apart on us on the way. But we have to have a fix on the damn lander. This is Plan B.”

The others kept yelling over the comm, but she stopped replying. The notebook was sitting on the ground, beside the makeshift bed where she'd left it the night before. Calmly, she picked it up and began ripping the pages out, stuffing them into her exploration suit. Aresian landscapes, notes on the trip surrounded her, insulating her body from the cold outside. Newer pages now, letters to her friends, crunched into loose balls and placed around her torso, keeping her core warm. Finally, near the neck of the suit, the letter she'd penned to Nathan. She caught a glimpse of the final line as she tore it from the book. “I want you to know that I always loved you, even if I didn't know how to show it—I'm sorry I couldn't have shown you more.” Bittersweet, she thought, stuffing it into place. I hope they give it to him if I don't make it.

She sealed her helmet, and picked up her bag. It felt oddly light, emptied of everything but essentials now. She switched the comm on inside the helmet, and moved toward the door of the tent.

“Alright, boys. Here I go!”

Year Twenty Fifty One

Dejah looked at herself in the mirror, somewhat surprised. She knew that she'd been getting more in shape with the daily workouts and weekly training, but she hadn't been this toned since the University. “Wish I had time to take the Valkyrie out today,” she said, glancing over at the glider bag that was propped up in the closet. It was such a hassle though, she thought. There weren't any good updrafts or canyons until you got to the edge of the Tharsis bulge, and that was a half day's journey away. Good for camping trips, but not for impulse flights.

A few minutes later, she trotted down the apartment steps, and headed for the warehouse.

She had woken up earlier than usual, and no one was in the warehouse when she arrived, except for kruiser. He was half hidden under a big rig, tinkering with the drive system on the wheels, and she could hear him cursing before she stepped inside the building.

“Hey!” she shouted, and she heard the clang of a dropped tool on the concrete floor.

“Shit!” he yelled, and slid out from under the vehicle. “Oh, it's you. I was expecting somebody important.”

She grinned, and offered him a hand. He grabbed it and pulled himself to a stand, leaving oil all over Dejah's palm. “Sorry about that,.” he said, and tossed her a stained rag. “Hazard of the job, you know.”

She wiped the grease off of her hand, and nodded. “Listen, I was wondering. How long have you been working here?”

He thought for a minute. “Let's see, they put this Dome up twenty years ago, but there wasn't much here at the time. This was the first Dome, you know, very experimental. Once they got the kinks worked out, they put up Spirit and Opportunity. I think I've been here for seventeen years now.”

“A mechanic the whole time?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I like the work. Everybody here needs a good mechanic, all of the time.”

she leaned against a table and studied him. “Kruiser, you're smart. You can fix damn near anything, and jury rig anything you can't outright fix. But you keep it hidden behind that whole grease monkey stereotype. Why don't you get tested for a Scout job, or any of the others?”

He looked her in the eye. “Because I like this job. It's a great job. I get to do what I want with my evenings, and hear about all the stuff going on here every day. You know, I grew up on Earth, and I'd spend all my time thinking about space, wondering if I'd ever get up there. Couldn't keep my mind off it, even in Mass. Thought that the candles were just like the stars, except that there were more stars. Hopped a shuttle as soon as I turned eighteeen and made it to Luna, then off to Mars as soon as it could support life outside a damn suit.”

“No family?”

He smirked, and shook his head. “Nah. Never had time, and couldn't find anyone who didn't just want to settle. It's ok. Mars is enough for me.”

They both turned as Eduardo walked into the warehouse, singing at the top of his lungs. “Chantilly lace, a pretty face...yeah baby, you know what I like!” He grinned, and gave a mock salute. “Hello earlybirds! Dej, you ready for another exgtrication today? I've got a fun one in store. Full suit, lander in pieces, and a storm on the horizon.”

She groaned, and threw the rag at him. “Damn you, couldn't you wait until the middle of the week to spring something like that on me? Seriously, a Wednesday! How about a Wedesday? Then it's not a Monday, and it's too early to wrekc my weekeend.”

He grinned. “what, you got plans? Your husband flying in this weekend or something?”

She rolled her eyes and walked away. “I gotta check the reports,” she called over her shoulder. “I'll come back when you've matured past the age of twelve.”

the team stood around the buried Lander replica, staring at the wreckage.

“Damn Eduardo,” muttered Thomas. “What did you do, drop it from orbit? There's pieces of it everywhere!”

It was true, Dejah thought., The solar panels had been splintered and scattered around the site. The lander was half buried, but the camera assembly was snapped off, and sticking out of the ground a meter away. Other bits of metal were scattered around, on top of the soil and half buried, and Dejah was pretty sure there were a lot of pieces that could be seen. She sighed.

“Alright, well, the main body of the thing still looks like it's in one piece. Let's try the standard plan to pull it free, then we'll collect the pieces we can see, and run a metal detector.”

“don't forget,” Eduardo said, trying to restrain a grin, “there's a storm on the horizon. Looks like a strong one, and we need to be back in the rig by then. We can navigate back to the Dome by instruments if we have to, but these suits wouldn't last a minute in those winds.”

She groaned, and nodded. “Yes, there's the storm. How much time does it give us, conservative estimate?”

“Five hours.”

“Five frakkin' hours?” she blurted out, then bit her lip and shook her head. “Then we'd better get moving. Thomas, get that crane spooled down to take up the slack as soon as we've got a harness on it. Eduardo, we've going to dig like we've never dug before.”

Two hours later, a harness was wrapped around the main structure of the Lander, and Thomas took up the slack so that the crane was supporting most of its weight. Dejah began to scrape away the dust from around the lander. The legs, as always, took a long time to clear completely, but she gave the thumbs up to Thomas to take in the cable on the crane.

With a groan, the lander began to move upward, then caught. “What the hell-?” began Dej, starting to give the signal to lock the crane down, but it was too late. With a crunch of rusted metal, the legs of the lander gave way. Two of them fell back into the freshly dug pit, taking part of the underbelly along with them. The others twisted out of shape, but held.

Dejah swore, and kicked a nearby dust pile. “Damn it! Ok, Eduardo, you get the last of those leg pieces free, and pick up anything in the pit you can see. We've got an hour and a half, and I really don't want to leave any pieces of this thing behind if we don't have to.” She grabbed the metal detector from the back of one of the rigs. “Thomas, lock the damn crane into position, and come help me clean this place up.”

“Thirty minutes until storm fall,” Eduardo announced over the comm as he stepped out of the pit, cradling a canvas bag full of rusted metal. “How's it going up here.”

Dejah glared at him, and he pretended to blow a kiss through his helmet. “We've got all the surface pieces, and most of the buried ones that I could find. Thomas, you got that last marker I put down right?”

“Got it. Piece of the solar panel. Pulling it free now.” He pulled a shard of the panel out of the dust, caked in red dirt, and put it into a bag.

“Alright, let's give it fifteen more minutes, then get into the rig. I don't want to lose the whole damn mission because we wouldn't leave behind a two inch sliver of rust.” She swung the detector in a wide circle, listening for the telltale beeps.

Five minutes before the storm would have hit, had there been one, Dejah loaded the team into the rigs, and got all of the cabs sealed. They turned the vehicles around in a wide circle, and headed back to the Dome.

Dejah, fighting through her exhaustion, called over the comm, “So Eduardo, how did we do? We got out before the storm, right?”

“Yeah, we did, but we left some stuff behind. I think there were another couple of square centimeters of solar panel left, and there's a foot of the lander that I'm missing.”

“Would it be enough for Heritage to be able to reconstruct it for the museum?”

“Yeah, I think we could still get them to pay out, under the circumstances. I'll log it as a successful mission.”

She acknowledged the report, and logged off for a moment. Then she leaned forward, and asked, “How long did you have that thing rusting, anyway? What'd you do, soak it in a pool?”

He laughed, and Dejah grinned tiredly. The Dome loomed ahead, sparkling like a diamond in the setting sun.

nano post 54

2009-11-25T09:59:00.001-08:00

Year Twenty Fifty Two

Dejah couldn't sleep. The wind gusted in unpredictable ways, scraping the sand at first quietly, then loudly across the walls of the tent. Dejah lay in the blankets, watching the line of the sand slowly rise up the walls of the tent. Almost four feet now.

She rolled over and looked at the roof of the tent, glad that it had been designed with a slight peak to keeo sand and dust from collecting on top and collapsing the structure. Maybe keeping her eyes focused there could keep her from thinking about the rising drifts outside.

The fabric of the hab tent rippled in the wind, and she began to see patterns in the ripples, images, pictures. Canyons and valleys danced across the ceiling, replacing each other in quick succession. There, wasn't that odd little ripple the spitting image of the Silver Hammer? And that one, just like the long street she walked down every day to get to the Dandelion office in Spirit City? Multipe ripples joined and formed faces that flickered quickly in and out of existence. Max. Her mother. Shelle. Nathan. Eduardo. Thomas. Nathan again. Marcus. Nelson. Kruiser. Nathan. Carter. Nathan.

She blinked, and the faces disappeared, becoming simple ripples again. “I can't afford to go crazy now,” she whispered. “Come on Dej, you've been alone before now, you can do this. You can do this.”

It was a long time before the sun rose.

“We've got some rough training coming up,” Dejah commented to Carter as she stretched in the gym. He was swinging through a simple routine on the rings, and finished the routine before landing, and replying.

“Oh? More problem sims?”

She shook her head, and jumped to the top of the balance beam. “Nope. We're schedule for a round of sensory deprivation. We've got to take turns driving one of the rigs solo, and just in case one of us gets trapped there, or seperated from the group, we've got to get used to being on our own. Pretty standard for long range missions, but not something i've ever had to do before. I'm more of a people person, you know?”

He nodded, stretching his arms. “Yeah, I'd kind of figured that. You didn't really seem like the introverted type.”

“My husband is, though. I think he'd do fine with the whole sensory deprivation thing, but he never had any interest in going outside the domes. I mean, to do anything on the surface, he was fine traveling to other domes or going to see specific things.” She shrugged. “It worked pretty well for us, as long as I gave him some time in the evenings when he could work in silence. I'd just stick my headphones on and work on my own projects.”

“Well, I hope the training goes well,” Carter commented, wiping the sweat from his neck with a towel. “Talk to you later,” he called, sprinting out of the room.

Dejah watched him go, and again felt a temporary regret that he was so much younger. Then she turned her mind back to the beam, and began a routine. After a few cartwheels, she felt her fingers slip over the edge of the beam, and tried to catch herself as she fell. It was too late; her center of balance shifted, and she hit the mat.

“Crap,” she muttered, dusting herself off. “Concentrate, Dej. You're too distracted.” She jumped to the top of the beam again, and started over.

A middle aged woman lead the three team members through the sensory deprivation area. It was a small room, with a wall of tube-like structures in the far end.

“these are the chambers,” the woman explained. She had introduced herself as Melanie Hatch, a psychologist. “you slid in and just lay down. The material is specially designed so that it feels like you're floating. You'll find water inside, heated to your body temperature; this will tend to make you unable to sense the borders of your bodies. The inside will be completely dark, and you may hear occasional sounds—we need you awake for the entire time. The time for each of you may vary, but it's rarely less than two hours, sometimes as much as ten.”

“How do you determine the times,” asked Dejah, eyeing the wall.

“Mostly from your profiles. We want to push you to your own breaking point, and see how well you can handle it. Don't worry, it's not as scary as it sounds. Anyone here claustrophobic, by the way?”

All three shook their heads. Melanie nodded. “You don't get too many claustrophobes in the colonies: space travel itself usually weeds them out. But I like to check just to make sure. Alright, everyone ready?”

They nodded, and Melanie opened the first tube. “Who's first?”

Eduardo stepped forward with a grin. “Aw hell, might as well be me. I'm not afraid of being alone with myself for a while.”

He grabbed a bar that hung over the tube, and slid down into it; Melanie closed the door, and turned to the other two, an eyebrow raised.

Thomas nodded. “I'll go. Having some quiet time actually sounds nice.” He slid into his chamber, and was closed in.

“Alright, you're the last one,” Melanie commented to Dejah, opening a third tube. “In you go!”

Dejah slid in, and felt the darkness close in around her. Then the door was closed, and the silence was louder than she had ever thought.

She tried to remember the page of the mission schedule that she'd been reading that morning, but couldn't seem to call it to mind. She hummed a few songs, but found that she couldn't remember the words to more than one or two.

She tried wiggling a foot to listen to the sound of the water spalshing against the all, but couldn't hear anything. She figured that the walls must be made of some material that lessened the sound.

Dejah let herself be still for a moment, and felt the silence all around her. It felt like a roaring in her ears sometimes, sometimes it was just...silent. She shivered; not from cold, but from discomfort.

She wiggled her toes again, trying to remember where her feet ended and the water began. It helped a little, but her motion was too restricted to allow much more than that. She tapped her fingers on the foam that supported her, and felt it give way slightly.

Dejah felt like she was floating in space, in an empty void between planets, betweeen stars. The air was warm, everyhting was warm, but empty. She herself was empty, just a hollow shell floating into the void.

A series of clicks sounded in her ears, jolting her from her reverie, and she realized that she had been on the verge of falling asleeep. She wiggled a foot again, but there was almost no distinction between her body and the water.

Strange colors began to appear in front of her eyes, changing and morphing into bizarre and complex patterns. “I've heard about this,:” she murmured, tapping her fingers on the foam again. “In the absence of light, the eyes strain, trying to see, and the brain begins to interpret phantom lightd and colors. Common danger for spelunkers.”

Dejah fell silent again, and blinked. She relized that her eyes had slightly dried—it was harder to remember to blink when she only saw darkness when her eyes were open.

She decided to see how much of her life she could remember, and thought back to the lunar colony, life with her parents. Two years old? Three? She suddenly remembered a beloved toy, a tiny blue hippopotamus, a gift from the dentist for good behaviour during a visit. She sfelt the corners of her lips twitch in a smile, and went back into the memories. Home, the colony, the tiny gravity of Luna, the hours spent in gravity chamnbers, keeping her muscles from atrophy. Flying with Max, nearly crashing. Then the visits from Dandelion, the final years of high school, the flight....

She felt as if she were flying again. Not towards Mars, she thought absently, flying towards the future. Towards something I cannot see...

The clicks sounded in her ear again, and she jerked awake. She felt a scream rising in the back of her throat, but choked it back and resisted the urge to pound on the awalls of the tube and demand to be let out. She sclenched her hands into fists, and held them stiffly at her sides.

She wasn't sure how much later it was that the door of the tube cracked open. She winced, though her eyes were already closed, and tried to lift a hand to block the light that now hurt her eyes. She found that her fingers were stuff and sore, having been held tense for hours. She slid out, shivering in the cold room while melanie handed her a towel.
“How long was I in there for,” she asked, teeth chattering as the chill of the room sank into her wet skin.

“Almost seven hours,” Melanie responded. “You're the leader of the team, and we needed to make sure that you could handle the worst of it. There were a few tense moments there—your heart rate spiked a couple of times, and we almost pulled you out. But in the end you did fine.” She smiled slightly, and held the door open.

Dejah walked into the next room, clutching the towel close around her. There were a row of lockers there, and she quickly located the one where she had stored her clothes. She toweled the swimsuit dry, and pulled the clothes over it, finally beginning to feel warm again.

Her hands were still shaking, but she walked home in the deepening twilight, and made it into the house. She leaned back in the chair, but didn't close her eyes. “It's going to be worth it,” she said quietly to no one in particular. “I'm going to be the girl who found the last of the Earth era landers, who brought the Phoenix home. It's all going to be worth it in the end.”

Before she knew it, six months had passed in Bradbury Dome. Dejah woke early on a Saturday, and hopped out of bed. She got dressed,and quickly walked down the steps to her apartment, and headed into the town.

On the way, she punched a number into her comm. “Hey Max! I hear you're going to be in town today, is that right? Great! I want to come see you, do you have any time to spare? Sure! Ok, I'll see you there.” She grinned, tucked her comm into her back pocket, and sprinted all the way into the city.

The launch pad was crowded, as it almost always was on the weekends, with tourists and sightseerers, and people going to and fro on official business. Dejah saw the Hammer sitting on the launch pad with Max standing beside her, giving some instructions to one of the crew. He turned and saw her, and grinned, waving wildly.

“Dej! It's been too long, how are you?”

She ran up to him, and was gatehred up into one of his usual exuberant hugs. “I'm great Max! I can't believe it here, this place is amazing! You wouldn't believe all the stuff that's got to be done before the mission, though. Here in the next few months, the PR department is even going to have me start recording some interviews and teaching sessions for kids, they're going to broadcast them all over to try to ddrive interest in the mission,. Crazy, huh?”

“You? Always.” He grinned as she punched him in the arm. “Hey, i've got all day, I don't leave til tomorrow morning. I've seen most of the town, and honestly, science and research bases really don't have muhc in the way of good retail. But i've never really been to the Dandelion buildings here, except to make the occasional pick up or delivery. Why don't you show me around?”

She made a face. “That's where I spent sixty hours a week, sometimes more! I love it, but I need a break. How about taking the elevator up Olympus? We won't have time to get to the top,. But there's that nice little halfway station. We could even grab a late lunch or dinner there.”

Max nodded. “Sounds good! I haven't done that in a few years anyway.”

The mountain was more than a short walk, so they hired a transport, and arrived at the base of the mountain after a twenty minute drive,. Max paid the driver, while Dejah bought the tickets for the elevator. They climbed into a tram, and traveled a few hundred meters into the mountain, where the elevator began.

The elevator was a series of hundreds of small cars, with glass sides and seats against the walls. The cars were strung along a long cable, and they rose like tiny gems on a necklace, to the top of the mountain. Passengers could disembakr at any of the waystations, and at the top, made their way to a second elevator cable, which took them down.

Max settled into one of the seats at the back of the elevator, but Dejah leaned against the front wall, resting her forehead on the glass.

“There's not going to be anything to see until we clear the base of the mountain, Dej,” laughed Max. “You might as well sit.”

“No, i've been going stir crazy lately, I think I'll stand.”

In a moment, the car began moving upward. It stopped every few meters to pick up other passengers at the base, but made slow and steady progress. In twenty minutes, the car had cleared the base of the mountain, and come out into the open air.

Dejah looked out over the red landscape spread out below. It looked like old red velvet, crinkled and dusty, a pale red in the morning light.

“I still can't get enough of this,” she said quietly. “This is what makes it all worth it.” She smiled over her shoulder at her friend. “I've been through hell these past few years, Max. The University was amazing, but after that...” She shook her head. “Dandelion, at least in Spirit City, wasn't anything like what I expected. Too much desk work, too little time in the field, and what we did work on just didn't matter. Things with Nathan just went downhill, you know about that. And even here, it's been rough.” She pulled down the shoulder of her shirt and the atmo suit beneath it, and showed him the mark the Martian atmosphere had left on her skin. “Got this doing an ordinary rover run on the obstacle course. Couldn't move my arm for two days. Then there were the problem sims, where I have to watch my team mates die, and try to figure out how I could have saved them. There was the sensory deprivation chamber, where I thought I was going crazy.”

She turned back to the window, and watched the horizon slowly roll into the distance as the car rose higher and higher. “But this reminds me why I'm here. And it is worth it, Max. It is.”

he leaned forward and looked at her. “What if you don't get the Phoenix, Dej? I'm not saying you won't, I believe you will, really I do. But...” He shrugged. “Is it still worth it if you don't?”

She thought for a moment, eyes still fixed on the landscape. “I don't know, Max. I want it so bad. I need to do something here, something to say that I was here, that I was on Mars, that I made a difference. The Phoenix is part of that, but you know, I've loved that machine ever since I was a kid,.”

She turned away from the window, and sat down beside Max, still watching the glass pane. “I really don't know, Max. I guess I'll find out, if I don't get the Phoenix.” then she grinned, and leapt to her feet again. “But I'm going to get that lander, and nothing is going to stop me!”

nano post 53

2009-11-25T09:58:00.001-08:00

Year Twenty Fifty Two

The day passed slowly, and Dejah thought she might lose her mind after listening to the endless scraping of the windblown dust outside. By the end of the day, the sand was piled up over three feet high around the walls of the tent, and the storm showed no signs of letting up.

She checked the filters, for the fourth time that day. They were getting close to being full, but there was still some time left. “Probably ought to do that first thing tomorrow,” Dejah noted.

The journal was tucked into a bag once again, now almost full of notes about the trip, sketches of landscapes she'd crossed, and letters to friends and family.

One more day, she thought. One more day, and the seals of the hab tent would be completely blocked by sand. She might be able to dig herself out, she mused, but only for one day further. If the sand piled up much higher than that, it would pour into the tent faster than she could climb out, and she would run the risk of being buried in the sediment.

She pulled the blankets up over her suit, and lay down for the night, though she knew already that sleep would be impossible.

The weeks passed quickly for Dejah as she fell into the patterns of the mission training. It took several months for the bruise caused by the accident to disappear, but she was back on the course the next week, and whooped when she completed the canyon run without incident.

After several weeks of running basic big rig simulations, Thomas approached Dejah.

“Hey, Dej. I think we're all pretty solid on the big rig sims, and i'll start giving you lessons in the real ones soon. But I've got a bunch more programs of problem simulations that I'd like to put us through. Is it alright with you if I start with one of those today?”

“Sure,” she said, “We need to start working on the harder stuff now that we've got the basics down. Besides, you're in charge of the rig training, you don't even need to ask me.”

“Yeah, but I thought I'd let you know. Sometimes people react badly to the problem sims. They're pretty realistic.”

“how so?”

He shrugged. “Well, you know how we divide up into the two rig simulators? The basic ones are pretty simple, you see what the other one is doing, but there's not much that can go wrong unless you deliberately steer the rigs into each other. In this problem runs, you can face things like an engine catching fire, a rig tumbling off a cliff, things like that.”

Dejah wasn't concerned. “I've run lots of sims where I died, Thomas. It's not unusual. I can handle it, and so can Eduardo.”

“No, that's not what usually gets to people.” thomas looked uncomfortable. “The people in the other rig, if they're not involved in the accident, have to watch it happen. And that's the part that most people can't handle, just having to sit there and watch, even when you know it's just a sim.”

“Well, I guess we'll find out what we're made of then, won't we?” Dejah tried to laugh it off, but quickly stopped when she saw the look on the rig driver's face.

When Eduardo returned from working on the next extrication scenario, the three loaded up into the simulators. The simulators looked like the cabs of the big rigs that were lined up in the warehouse, but from the outside, the windows looked black and opaque. Once inside, the windows revealed themselves to be high quality screens, which projected the view of the scenario in realistic perspective and detail. Several times Dejah had forgotten for a moment that she was even in a simulator.

Thomas climbed into the control cab, and Dejah and Eduardo quickly entered the other rig. The screens flickered to life, and Eduardo took the wheel, steering them across a flat and unremarkable landscape.

They drove for at least twenty minutes, Dejah thought, before the canyon first appeared on the horizon. It was narrow, which made it hard to see from a distance, but the walls were steep.

“What do you guys think we should do?” came Thomas' voice through the comm. “It looks like it narrows off to the the west, we might be able to get around it there.”

Eduardo scanned the area, and pulled up the aerial photographs, all programmed into the simulator beforehand. “Yeah, looks like this is the arm of a bigger canyon. Just a little gully by Mars standards. Ok, let's go around to the West, it's the only way we're going to get around this.”

The rigs chugged forward, never making more than thirty five kilometers an hour. Eventually, the narrow end of the gully came in sight, and Dejah watched Thomas drive the rig toward it. Then suddenly, there was a slight motion in the ground below her feet. She watched in horror as the soil beneath Thomas' rig gave way. It looked like nothing she had ever seen, as the ground seemed to turn almost liquid and fall away. In another moment, the rig had slid off of the edge of the cliff, and was tumbling to the canyon below. A yell of terror sounded over the comm, and was suddenly cut off. A moment later, the two heard a loud thump as the rig hit the canyon floor many meters below.
Dejah could hear her heart pounding in the deaathly silence that followed the accident, then the windows flickered and turned black. A line of text appeared: simulation failed—loss of equipment and personnel. Retry or exit?

“Exit.”

Dejah jumped as she heard Thomas' voice in her comm, and heard eduardo repeat the command in a shaky voice. The door of the cab popped open, and they climbed out.

Thomas was waiting. “So. That was a problem run. It's one of the simpler ones, actually. I admit, it's not quite fair the way I set it up. There's not much the second rig can do, short of telling the driver of the first rig to give the edge of the canyon more space.”

“But there were meters of room,” Eduardo protested, and Dejah could see that he was shaken. “There's no way the edge of that cliff collapsed under just the weight of the rig.”

thomas shook his head. “No, there isn't. It wasn't just the weight. Dej, you know a good bit of geology. Tell us about how those gullies are formed.”

“Um...” Dejah shook her head to clear it and tried to remember the lessons from the University. “It's subsurface water. It comes up very slowly, and as it gets near the surface, it makes the soil unstable, and it sinks down into the canyon below. I guess the weight of the rig was just the tipping point then?”

The driver nodded solemnly. “So you can't just rely on your sight to tell you everything you need to know. There's a lot happening out there, a lot of it is under the surface where you can't even see it. A lot of people are fooled by the lack of tectonic activity on mars, and assume that that means the surface is stable. You make that assumption in the wrong place, and you're dead.”
Dejah dn Eduardo nodded. “got it, man,” Eduardo muttered, running a hand through his thick hair again.

“That's it for today,” Thomas said, turning to Dejah. “It's almost three o'clock, did you have anything else you wanted to cover today?”

She took a moment to respond, then shook her head. “No, I think we all need a breather after this one. I'll see you guys bright and early tomorrow morning.”

They bid her goodbye, and she saw Eduardo turn to say something else to Thomas, but didn't stay to hear what it was.

Her hands shook as she unlocked her door, and quickly shut it behind her. She barely made it to the chair before collapsing, unable to stop the shaking.

A half an hour later, she rubbed her arms, and finally looked around. No mail had come through the slot, and she had already read the mission reports for the week. Looking around for something to take her attention off the shock of the simulation, she pulled her comm out of her pocket. With a hand that still trembled, she punched in Nathan's number.

It beeped a few times, then she heard his calm voice come on the other end of the call. “Hey Dej! Sorry we've been playing comm tag for the last week or two, the tiem difference really makes it tricky to keep up.”

She tried to say something breezy in return, but no words came.

“Dej? Are you ok? Is everything alright?”

She swallowed, and finally forced the words out. “Yes. Yeah, sorry, everything's alright, just a hard day of training today. We had a rough simulation, looked for all the world like one of my team drove over the edge of a cliff. Gave us all a pretty good shock, I guess I'm still shaken up over it.”

“Well, I know you, you're strong,” he replied, in what she assumed he thought was a comforting tone. “You can pull through it.”

Why can't you be here to hold me, she thought, but didn't say it. “I know, it's not like I'm traumatized or anything. It just rattled me, that's all. I guess that's part of the point, you know?”

“Sure, of course. So what's Bradbury Dome like? Have you had any time to explore the city?”

“A little, but not much,. Met a guy who knows Marcus. How's your latest project coming?”

“Oh, it's fantastic! I really think this might be a breakthrough for my career. The building is in the heart of the city...”

She leaned her head against the back of the chair and let him ramble on, just listening to the familiar sound.

Dejah awoke in the middle of the night. The room was cold, despite the heaters that ran continually. She turned over, and soon realized that she wouldn't be able to go back to sleep without doing something else.

She rolled out of the bed, and quickly reached for the thick robe that she'd laid out the night before. She walked over to the kitchen, and put water on to boil. None of the usual tea selections seemed right, so she put a few scoops of hot chocolate in a mug, and waited for the water to heat.

A few minutes later as she carefully sipped the hot drink, she pulled back the curtains and gazed out of the window.

Even in the middle of the night, there were lights burning in many of the Dandelion office's windows, and looking out across the city to the west, she could see lights there as well. “A city that never sleeps,” she commented, taking little comfort in the fact that there were others as wakeful as she.

“Just don't let me get anyone killed,” she muttered, not sure to whom she was directing the request. “I don't mind if it's me, just don't let anyone else get hurt.”

The next morning, Dejah awoke slowly, drifting up towards consciousness, following the blaring alarms of the clock. She fumbled with the switch for a moment before she suceeded in turning it off, and lay there for a moment, trying to convince herself to get up.

With a sigh, she heaved herself out of the bed, and got dressed. “Time to face the day,” she said as she locked the door behind her.

In a few minutes, she walked back into the warehouse, a smile on her face. “Hello, boys! What's on the schedule for today?”

Nano post 52

2009-11-25T09:57:00.000-08:00

The next day, Dejah called Nelson as soon as she got to work.

“Hey Nelson, I just got a packet of letters from some kids on earth. Do you know anything about that?”

“I believe that any fan mail you receive would come through this office, so I'm sure we have a record of it somewhere. Why?”

“I'd like to send them something in return. I don't think I have anything extra in my budget though, and it would take me a little while to save up the leftovers from my stipend. I thought you might have some ideas.” She stuck a finger in one ear in a futile attempt to block out Eduardo's blaring music.

“I don't know, I'll have to check into it. I know we'll have some promotion items when the departure gets closer, but I don't have much at the moment. I'll let you know. How old are the kids.”

“Second graders.”

“Ah, I have a daughter about that age. I'll see what we can do, Ms. Sorenson.”

“Ok, thanks!” She closed the comm and stuck it in a pocket. “Ok, Eduardo, you're still working on resetting the extrication scenario right?”

He nodded. “Yeah, it'll probably take me a couple of days to get it completely reset. I figure a week's prep for each initial scenario, and minimum three days for each reset.”

“Thanks. Thomas, how are you coming along with the simulators for the rigs?” Dejah turned to the large quiet driver.
“We're almost there, for the first couple of sims anyway. I was able to take some existing programs and add in the variables we need, but there are a few tricky parts that have to be coded manually. I should be done by Monday, though.”

Dejah nodded. “alright. In that case, let's plan for another extrication exercise on Monday, and follow it up on Tuesday and Wednesday with rig sims. Sound like a plan?” the two men nodded, and quickly went back to work on their individual projects.

“What about you, Dej?” Eduardo asked as he pulled on a breather in prepration for directing the resetting of the extrication ground.

“I think I'm going to sign out one of the small rovers, and clock some time on the obstacle course. I want to try to spend at least one day a week on the course: I haven't really driven these since my exploration courses at the University, and I need to brush up on my skills.”

“I hear you there. See ya tomorrow!” he said with a wave as he started the rover and roared off into the exercise yard.

Dejah scanned her ident badge into the reader next to the rovers, and pulled her exploration suit from one of the nearby lockers. In a moment, she'd snapped her helmet into place and was driving off towards the obstacle course. She drove the rover slowly through an airlock, and found herself out on the open Tharsis plateau. She followed the dirt path that had been pointed out to her, and soon found herself looking out across a miniature Mars: it seemed as if every type of terrain that Mars offered was represented. Cliffs and a canyon on one side, flat hard packed dirt plains on another, various different mixes of gravel, sand, and dust all over. The course looked as if it stretched for several kilometers; Dejah looked over the whole thing for a minute, then decided to start out on one of the simpler courses, a flat expanse of hard packed dirt, with a few flags to serve as turn markers. She could see dust clouds from several other rovers on the range, and wondered what other missions might be in preperation. An attendant drove up on a battered rover, and asked to see her ident. As it was scanned, he smiled, and greeted her.

“Getting in some driving time? That's a good idea—you wouldn't believe how many people assume that because they've driven a rover before, they'll know how to drive it under all conditions. We encourage our scouts to get as much rover and rig time out here as they can.”

“that's the idea,” Dejah agreed, checking the seals on her suit one last time. She gunned the motor once, then sent the rover rolling over the terrain. The rover only had a top speed of forty kilometers an hour on good terrain, but they were rugged, and their low bodies and large wheels enabled them to go over much more rugged terrain than ordinary transports.

Dejah drove in simple slaloms around the flags for the first few rounds, testing the soil and gearing up her reflexes. Then she circled around to the beginning of the course and ran it again, this time holding the rover to a tight circle around each flag, bringing it in as close to the flagpole as she dared. Once or twice, she misjudged the dirt beneath the wheels, and slid out from the flag for a few meters before correcting her course. After the second time through the course this way, she was able to make each turn correctly, and maintain control of the vehicle. She slowed to a stop, and paused to catch her breath.

The attendant pulled up again. “Pretty good driving there! I like how you handled those turns, but you've really gotta watch it. Most places on the surface have more dust or sand than that, and it can really take you by surprise. Did you want to try a different course for a while? Several of the others just opened up.”

“Is the canyon open?” Dejah asked, looking across the course. “I haven't driven in canyons in years.”

“Yeah, looks like the last driver just left. If you get into trouble over there, just call out on the common channel and I should be able to pick it up and get you out. And watch out for rock slides: we try to make those canyon walls as solid as we can, but there's always a danger.”

Dejah laughed. “Well, if I didn't know how to watch out for rock slides, I'd have no business driving through a canyon on Mars. But I'll keep an eye out, thanks.”

She drove over to the canyon, and looked out across the course. There were no flags here, just a rocky canyon floor, with areas of fallen rock and dust, and layers of soft drifted sand.

Then with a roar of the engine, she directed the rover down the gentle slope and into the canyon. Immediately, she could feel the wheels digging into the soft sand, sinking and sliding, and she struggled to control it.

She pressed down on the accelerator again, and turned into the slide; the tires caught, and she felt the rover gain speed as it rolled quickly across the top of the sandy floor. The canyon wound around tight hairpin curves, and Dejah was glad she had just finished the turns on the basic course.

The canyon wound around for about a kilometer, and Dejah struggled to keep the rover on course, and at a speed that would both allow her to stay on top of the soft sand and take the curves safely.

She could see the end of the canyon coming up, there were just two more turns. She pulled the rover to the left, taking the first curve at almost top speed; the rover rounded the corner, but Dejah saw the next turn coming up too quickly. She tried to slow the rover, and pulled it to the right, but the correction came almost too late. The rover's wheels scraped against the canyon wall, and almost jolted her out of the seat.

Dejah felt a protruding section of canyon wall scrape against her shoulder, and almost immediately felt the freezing cold of the outside air inside the suit. “Damn!” she shouted, finishing the curve and bringing the rover to a halt. She looked at her shoulder, and saw that the suit had been shredded where the rock had scraped, and an inch of skin was open to the air. She felt the odd pain as her flesh tried to expand in the lower pressure of the Martian atmosphere, and quickly began to freeze. She clapped a gloved hand over the damaged area, and pressed her comm button with the other. “I need help! I hit the canyon wall. The rover's fine, but my suit tore and there's skin exposed. Bring a patch. I'm at the end of the canyon route.”

“On my way!” she heard the attendant respond. She climbed off of the rover, and leaned against the canyon wall, using the weight of her body to keep pressure on her hand. The skin underneath burned with pain, but she knew that releasing the pressure would only make it worse. Soon, she heard the roar of a rover engine and saw the attendant driving over the small cliff, and down a short slope to where she was.

“Ok, where's the tear? There? Alright, let's get this patch on.” The young man wiped the suit around the torn area clean with a cloth that steamed slightly as the moisture sublimed away. Then he unrolled a wide swatch of adhesive fabric, and pressed one end of it onto the suit near the shredded edge. “Ok, pull your hand away quickly, and I'll get this on there.”

Dejah did as he instructed, and her hand was hardly out of the way before he pressed the rest of the seal around the hole in her suit. “Alright, that should stop any further damage from happening. You're going to have one hell of a bruise there for a while, might lose a layer of skin, but you should be alright. We've got to get you back inside the Dome, though, and get you checked out. Can you drive?”

Dejah nodded. “Yeah. The path back to the Dome is pretty easy, and I can steer with my other arm.” she winced as the shock started to wear off, and her shoulder began to throb.

“I'll follow you back.” The young man punched a comm button. “I need backup at the course. We've got an injury, and I need to take her back to the Dome, so I need someone out here to watch the other drivers. Great.” He nodded to Dejah, who had gotten back on her rover. “Let's go!”

She started the engine, and slowly drove it up and out of the canyon. The path back to the Dome began not far from the edge of the cliff that overlooked the canyon route, and she quickly guided the rover onto it. The attendant followed a short distance behind; she asked him, “So do you get many injuries here?”

“Oh, a fair number. Serious ones are pretty rare. We try to keep things safe, obviously, but it's a rough terrain, and things happen. Since the range is for scouts and other field personnel, though, most people understand the risks.”

In a few minutes, they were through the air lock, and back inside the Dome. A small emergency station was just a few meters from the air lock, and Dejah pulled up to the door. “I'll be fine from here. Thanks for your help; I'll be back to try that canyon again next week!”

nano post 51

2009-11-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

Year Twenty Fifty Two

the storm was still blowing when Dejah awoke the next morning. “Day two,” she muttered, “and still stuck.” She got out of the makeshift bed, and began checking the walls. All of the seals seemed to be holding, and the pressure inside the tent kept it from collapsing, but she could tell that the dust had risen higher during the night. It was almost to her knee now.

The day was much like the one before it: a call to Bradbury Dome, trying to talk through the static and interference. Waiting, trying to keep her mind occupied. Dejah wished she could take the exploration suit off and do some basic stretches, but it was still too cold.

By the end of the day, she was singing songs to herself, nursey rhymes, even commercial jingles, anything she could remember. It didn't take long for her to run out of things to sing.

“I'm gonna go crazy here,” she exclaimed, throwing a used food container across the tent where it ineffectually slapped against the wall and fell to the floor.

She looked around the tent, and finally her eyes fell on her sketch pad. She couldn't think of anything else to draw, but perhaps she could write.

She pulled out a pen, and began to write.

“to whoever finds this diary. If you are reading this, then I probably died in the dust storm, or trying to reach the Phoenix...”

The weeks began to pass quickly, and the days fell into a familiar rythym. Wake early, go to the gym, do a quick workout, shower, head to the warehouse and word for a few hours, then to the cafeteria for lunch, back to the warehouse, one more trip to the gym, and then home for dinner.

Within tow weeks, Eduardo had built the first extrication simulation. He was eager to show it off, so Dejah, Kruiser, and Thomas followed him out to the exercise yard that he had used to recreate the first of several scenarios.

Dejah knew that many replicas of the Phoenix had been built for the team's use in training, but this was the first time she had seen any of them in person. There, buried in the dust, was a life-sized model of the Phoenix. The solar panels were snapped off, and only an edge or two of them peeked out through the dust. The camera assembly of the Phoenix was the only part free of the soil, though bits and pieces were visible under a heavy coating of dust.

It was a shock to actually see it, sitting there in the soil, she thought, even if you knew it wasn't the real thing. It looked tired, battered, and somewhat pathetic.

“Alright, this is extrication scenario number one, basic burial with dust. We're going pretty late in the year, and there's a chance that we'll see some carbon frost, but we should be there before the main freezing sets in. We'll just go with the dust for now, and worry about frost in a later sim.” Eduardo explained the basic terrain, pointing out features of the landscape that they would be likely to see if the Phoenix was still where it had last been seen.

Thomas drove one of the big rigs over. It had a crane on the back, capable of supporting several hundred pounds of weight. He unspooled a little of the cable, letting the hook on the end come down a few feet above the ground. “I need something to hook this onto,” he said.

Dejah looked at the lander, and shook her head. “We can't attach it to anything on here directly. That dust weighs too much, we'd snap it apart. We're going to need to dig it out, and slip a harness under it.”
“Can we dig it out, though?” asked Thomas, surveying the sand. “It looks like it will just slip back into any hole we dig.”

“Well, let's try doing a shallow dig around it, and just gradually pulling the sand back. The important thing is to get all the soil off of it—then we only need to dig under a small part to get the harness under it. We can hook the harness onto the crane to support the weight, and then dig the rest out.”

Dejah rummaged through the cargo compartment of the rig, and came back carrying three shovels. She, Thomas, and Eduardo started digging, carefully clearing the area around the Lander, and gradually pulling the dust away from it.

“You really think it will be buried this deep, Eduardo?” Dejah grunted as she tossed another shovelful of dust away from the lander.

“It's our best guess as to why the cameras can't see it anymore,” he replied, “since there's no tectonic activity to move it anywhere, and no dust devil is anywhere near strong enough to even budge it, much less pick it up and drop it somewhere else. It's gotta be there, just buried.”

It took nearly two hours to clear the Lander enough to pass a harness under it, and even that proved tricky. Since the top of the Lander was almost level with the ground, Dejah had to worm her way down into the pit that they had dug, and pass the harness under, where Eduardo grabbed it, and hooked it onto the crane cable.

“Ok, Thomas, take up the slack. Don't try to pull it out, I just want to make sure it's not going to slip further down as we dig the rest of it out.” Thomas nodded, and climbed into the cab of the rig. The crane creaked to life, and slowly began retracting the cable. It took up the slack, and as soon as Dejah saw tension on the harness, she waved to Thomas. “Alright, that's it! Lock it down, I don't want that to slip while we're under it.”

Dejah and Eduardo slipped down into the shallow pit and began clearing the dust from the lower parts of the Lander. Dejah ended up lying on her stomach, almost curled around the Lander, scooping handfuls of dust from under the Lander, trying to make sure that the underbelly and legs were free. Her face was covered in the fine red dust, and she sneezed, feeling it in her lungs, even through the breathing masks they all wore.

“I'm gonna need to change the filter on this thing soon,” Dejah grumbled, indicating her breather. “This dust is ridiculous.”

“I think we're almost there,” Eduardo commented. “It looks like the legs are clear.”

“Thomas, give us a little tension on the harness, I want to see if it can move freely or if we've got to dig some more. I'm not really crazy about the idea of trying to get under that thing to dig, but I'll do it if we have to.”

The cable spool turned slowy, and the Phoenix creaked as the harness tightened. The replica shuddered, then moved upward, free of the soil. Dejah couldn't restrain a small cheer.

“We did it!”

eduardo laughed, and patted her shoulder. “Yes, we did. Now I get to bury it again, and we get to do this all over again in a week, this time in our exploration suits.”

Dejah groaned. “I hate those things! I can't move in them at all.”

“Yeah, well, not moving much is a small price to pay for staying alive. And we're going to be in those suits when we go get the real Phoenix, so we've gotta learn how to do it now. But I want to give each exercise a run through in just the atmo suits, so we know what we're getting into before we tackle it in the full getup.”

Thomas leaned out of the window of the rig. “Hey, Eduardo, you want me just to lower this thing back down? Or do you want to bury it somewhere else next time?”

The dark haired man thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No, we might as well put it back here. I'll pick a different location for the next scenario, but this is fine for now.”

The replica was slowly lowered back into the pit, and Dejah could already see the soil sliding back in to cover the feet of the lander. The temporary feeling of victory had faded, and she just felt tired.

“Well, it looks like the sun's going to be setting soon, so we'd best get back to the buildings,” thomas commented, looking up at the sky. “It'll be cold soon, and I didn't bring a jacket.”

The others assented, and quickly climbed into the cab of the rig. The vehicle bounced and bump its way through the landscape until they came back to the warehouse.

As she stepped down from the rig, Dejah saw Kruiser waving to her. “Hey Kruiser, what's up?”

“Just gotta check out the rig. Standard procedure, checking over every rig that comes back from a day in the field. If any of that dust builds up inside, it can get nasty. You look like crap, you know.”

His directness made her chuckle, and she ran a hand through her hair, sending a fine mist of cinnamon dust to the floor. She could feel the grit under her nails, on her scalp, and in her mouth, and grimaced. “I haven't been on an exercise like that in years. I forgot just how much dust there really is.”

He nodded, and stuck the wrench he'd been carrying in a loop in his belt. “Yeah, there's a hell of a lot of it, and I've never seen a way of keeping it out. Myself, I kinda like it after a while. Gives everything a bit of texture. Still feels like living in a damn pepper mill after a while.”

She nodded, and suddenly felt the exertion of the day hit her all at once. “I don't know about the texture thing, but I'll try to keep it in mind. I know I wouldn't trade this”—she shook a line of dust out of a wrinkle in her shirt— “for all the moon dust in the world, or all of the sand on the beaches of Terra. But if I don't get home soon, I'm going to fall over. I'll see you tomorrow, Kruiser.” He nodded, and moved to open the hood of the rig.

Dejah walked slowly, trying to conserve energy. I must be getting older, she thought. Five years ago, it wouldn't have hit me this hard. She walked up the steps to her apartment, and unlocked the door.

She closed and locked the door behind her, and flicked the switch on the wall. The room was flooded with warm light, and she saw a stack of letters on the floor, where they lay under the mail slot on the door.

“Letters?” she muttered, confused. “Why not just comm messages?”

She picked up the stack and set them on the table to look at later. She pulled a thick robe out of the closet, and stepped into the bathroom.

Dejah sighed, as she peeled off her clothing, caked with dust and sweat. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and snorted with laughter: her pale skin was streaked with bright red lines, dust that had caught and stuck to her body. I look like a tiger, she thought absently as she stepped into the shower.

The warm water relaxed away some of the tension in her shoulders, and she sighed as she felt the dust wash away. Looking down, she could see the red dust-filled water spiral away down the drain, where it would eventually find its way to the giant water recyclers in the city.

Dejah leaned backwards, letting the water flow into her hair and down her back, washing all the grit out of her hair. She scrubbed her scalp with her fingernails, feeling the sand slowly loosen and fall away.

When she stepped out of the shower and into the robe, Dejah still felt the exhaustion in every muscle, but a glow of satisfaction was beginning to set in. It had been a good day, she mused, a good exercise.

She grabbed the letters from the table, and curled up in the armchair to read them. She ripped open the first one, and pulled out a single sheet of cheap paper. A drawing, she noted with confusion. A red line had been drawn wobbling across the lower half of the page, and a stick figure stood atop it, with odd protrustions from the shoulders. Wings, she wondered, squinting at the image, or poorly drawn arms? A big yellow sun hung in the sky, which was a large blue scribble. In the far right corner of the drawing was a black boxy image which she couldn't make out at all. She turned the paper over, and saw a block of shaky handwriting on the back.

“Dear Dejah Sorenson,

I am Natalie Phillips. My class at Maxwell Elementary has adopted you as our person of the year, and my teacher helped up write letters to you. I hope you like my picture: it is of you and your glider, going to get the Pheenix. I hope you like it. We are all cheering for you! Love, Natalie”

Dejah set the paper down, feeling sudden tears spring to her eyes. There were really children following the mission, two years away? She looked for an address to write back, but saw none on the envelope. She made a mental note to have Nelson find out about the school, and reached for the next envelope. Another drawing, another letter, this one from a boy who informed her that he intended to come to Mars as soon as he got tall enough to pilot his parent's shuttle. The next was from another little girl who wanted to know how she kept her hair clean, and then another from a boy who offered to send her his best pocket knife to help dig Phoenix out of the dust. Finally, she found a letter from the teacher of the class, and read it eagerly.

“Dear Scout Sorenson;

My name is Emily Carson, and I teach a second grade class in Julian, California, on Earth. My class had great fun watching the announcement from Mars Heritage, and they were so disappointed when I told them that you wouldn't be going out to find the Phoenix for another two years. I couldn't stand the thought of seeing them lose interest in that time, so I asked them all to write to you now. It is my hope that by following your mission over the next two years—and you can be sure that we'll be tuning in to all of the scheduled classroom broadcasts—my students will maintain an interest in Mars and the further exploration of our solar system. We all know that you are very busy, so we don't expect any letters in return, but thank you so much for taking the time to read this.

With love from Earth,

Emily Carson”

Nano post 50

2009-11-25T09:55:00.002-08:00

Year Twenty Fifty Two

Dejah woke from a short nap to the now familiar sound of wind scraping the sand and ice over the tent. She checked her clock. Three in the afternoon. It was almost as dark as night outside the tent, and she stirred restlessly. The hab tent was made for limited occupation, usually just enough time to prepare meals and sleep, not for days at a time. There were few things inside to help pass the time.

Dejah recorded the last few days in her log, and made a few crude sketches of landscapes she'd seen along the way. She looked over satellite photos of her route, and tried to anticipate possible difficulties. The time passed slowly, but finally it was late enough that she felt she could eat dinner and go to bed without waking in the middle of the night.

The night was long, and she kept waking up. After a day of inactivity, her muscles were stiff and aching, and she wasn't tired enough to sleep through the night the way she usually did. She tossed and turned, trying to find a way to be comfortable in the exploration suit. As she rolled over, something caught her attention.

The walls near the floor of the tent were bowed in slightly. Dejah looked around the tent, and found that it was the same with all of the walls. She got up and knelt by one of the walls, and prodded the bowed area with a finger. It felt oddly solid, and with a shiver she realized what was happening.

The tent was slowly being buried.

Year Twenty Fifty

The alarm blared, and Dejah woke with a start. I must have set the alarm clock yesterday, she thought, and turned it off.

It was still mostly dark outside, but the sky was light. She peeked out of the window, and saw the bulk of Olympus silhoutted in the eaast.

She dressed quickly, shivering, and pulled on a heavy jacket. Stuffing a few papers in her bag, she hurried out of the door and locked it behind her. As she clattered down the steps, she could see other residents makign their way to various parts of the Dandelion building.

She could see the warehouse where she had dropped off her supplies two days earlier, and headed for it. The building's exterior was dark, but several large doors were open, and the light inside streamed onto the pavement.

As she stepped inside the building, she heard music blasting from a speaker, and looked around. She couldn't identify the style of music, but it sounded old; she thought she could hear guitars, and a horn section.

Eduardo approached, waving. “Hey, Sorenson! Didn't expect to see you out here so soon! Figured the jet lag would have you down for another day or two.”

She shrugged. “i never really felt lagged, and the apartment was getting boring. I think I'd rather go ahead and get to work. What's that music, by the way?”

He grinned. “You never heard rockabilly before?Man, that's some good stuff!”

“How old is that recording? It's got to be fifty years old!”

“Yeah, but the song's even older. Originally recorded in the 1950's!” He was obviously enjoying the music, and Dejah couldn't help smiling.

“Alright, so what's on the schedule for today? Or, actually, I think I'd like to draw up a schedule for the month. We've got some leeway until we get closer to the departure date.”

Eduardo motioned for her to come over to a table set up near one of the walls. There was a large sheet of paper unrolled over the surface, with a rough time line on it.

“this is the basic time line that you had in your proposal, but now we need to fill in the rest of the information,” he stated. “Now this list here,” he continued, pulling another folded paper from the pocket of his coveralls, “is a list of all of the training, sims, and excersizes that need to be covered before we head out. I expect we should sit down and plug all of these into the time line, and go from there.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Dejah said, running her eyes over the training list.

“Hey!” she heard a loud shout from across the warehouse, and turned to find a man running toward them. He was shorter than Eduardo, and had curly greying hair. “Hey, Eduardo, you weren't gonna start this crap without me, right? Because you sure as hell aren't going to just stand there and tell me what you want done when you haven't even bothered to check about what we should actually be working on.”

Eduardo shook his head, and said, “Dejah Sorenson, meet Kruiser. He's an annoying little prick, but he's also the best damn mechanic on Tharsis.”

“Tharsis, my ass,” responded the mechanic. “I'm the best damn mechanic you'll find on this whole planet.”

“Unfortunately, he's probably right,” Eduardo admitted. “He thinks it means he can get away with anything he wants.”

Kruiser reached out and shook Dejah's hand emphatically. “glad you're finally here, Sorenson, I've had enough of waiting around for something to happen. Now we'll see if you can actually get this damn thing going, or if you're just another useless over-educated university idiot.”

Oliver Thomas came up just then, and greeted Dejah warmly. She looked around the small circle. “Alright, is this it then? This is the core team?”

Eduardo nodded.

She bent over the time line and said, “Ok, let's get started then.”

It took most of the morning to reach an agreement about how best to divide up the time before the mission departed. Thomas wanted more time to run computer simulations of possible weather conditions that the team might encounter while driving the big rigs from Tharsis, Eduardo wanted to spend more time on various extraction techniques for retrieving the possibly buried Phoenix, and Kruiser had insisted on running almost constant exercises through a physical obstacle course. In the end, a plan of action had been hammered out, heavy on the simulations at the beginning, and moving to be more focused on physical exercises the nearer they got to the departure date.

“So, Thomas, you're going to be in charge of those big rigs simulations; put us through every situation you can think of with those. Kruiser, you start thinking about how you want to put those obstacle courses together. We've got the use of one entire training field, and we can always go out through the lock to the plateau. Use what you need to. Eduardo, you start getting the stuff we need for those extrication rehearsals, let's get the first one set up sometime this week, ok? I'll work on refining the time line, and setting up the plan b, in case we can't get the Phoenix out right away.”

They broke for lunch, and Dejah made her way over to the cafeteria. It was small, and there were perhaps twenty or thirty employees eating. Dejah picked out a sandwich and a bottle of juice, and sat at a small table. She had brought the list of training objectives, and was looking over it when she noticed someone standing beside the table. She swallowed her bite of sandwich quickly and looked up.

It was Scott, the receptionist, and behind him was another man, who seemed a bit nervous. “Hello, Scout Sorenson! We didn't expect you in today, but I'm glad you're here!” He gestured to the other man. “This is Nelson Madison, from our PR department. Although we know you're going to be very busy with the Phoenix project, Mars Heritage has requested that you make some appearances for them, and Nelson is here to tell you more about that.”

The nervous man sat down in a chair across the table from Dejah, and took a sheet of paper out of his briefcase. “It's good to meet you, Ms. Sorenson. As I'm sure you're already aware, this mission is a very high profile event, for Mars Heritage in particular, but also for Mars in general. This is the last of the probes that was sent from Earth to be recovered, and it's being seen as the end of an age, the beginning of a new era of indepence for Mars. Very big stuff, and there's a lot of thigns that need to be done. Here's a schedule of the events you'll be expected to make an appearance at. On the other side, you'll find information about recording dates. You'll be recording messages and a few interviews for school children all over the colonies. Even Earth is watching this one, and they're pretty excited about it.”

Dejah looked over the list. “This is a lot of dates. I don't want to spend too much time away from the project, I need to stay in the loop about all areas of preperation.”

Nelson nodded, wiping his glasses with a cloth. “Of course, of course. But these appearances are part of what help Heritage pay the bills, so you do need to be there. I think you'll enjoy it, overall. A lot of these people already know your name, because of the glider, so they're looking forward to seeing you. The first appointment is next week; the first of the recording sessions. You'll report directly to Mars Heritage for that—just go to their main office at nine on Tuesday morning, and they'll get you set up and explain about how it will work.” He punched a button on his wristband, and Dejah's comm beeped. “that's my contact information, please contact me with any questions, or to let me know if you are unable to make any of the appointments. Thank you for your time.” He picked up his briefcase, and walked stiffly through the cafeteria.

Dejah sighed, looking at the schedule. “I guess it would be too much to ask to just work on the mission and not have any of these other things.” She finished her juice, and tossed the bottle into the recycling bin on her way out the door.
The rest of the team was already off working out their plans and schedules for the mission preperation, and Dejah felt like getting rid of some of the nervous energy that had built up over the last few days.

“Hey, Eduardo!” she called.

“Yeah?”

“Is there a gym around here? I need to start getting in better shape for this stuff.”

“Yeah, there's a company gym in the next building over. Just take that path, turn right at the fork, and go through the big glass double doors. Can't miss it, just show them your ident card, they should have you on the access list by now.” He went back to poring over a sheet of information about the polar terrain, with Thomas pointing out pertinent data.

Dejah headed in the direction he had pointed, and soon found the gym. When she presented her ident card, the smiling attendant provided her with a water bottle and towel, along with a small brochure with information about the various machines available.

She decided to forgo the weight training equipment for a day, and headed toward the room that held the gymnastic equipment. “I used to be able to do some of this crap,” she muttered to herself as she opened the door, “let's see if I've still got what it takes.”

The room was set up so that each piece of equipment could be used by itself, or taken as part of a course. Dejah stretched for a moment, then decided to start with the monkey bars. She jumped up and caught the first bar, and quickly moved hand over hand to the end of the bars, and let go. The balance beam was next, and she quickly jumped to the top of it. She wobbled for a moment, then walked back and forth for a moment, testing her balance. She smiled, and quickly launched into a cartwheel, her hands and feet landing firmly on the narrow beam.

With a solid dismount, she sprinted out to the mat in the center of the room, and did a series of handsprings and cartwheels. On the far side of the room, she saw a set of rings, and grabbed them, pulling herself up until her arms were flat against her sides, and her feet well off the ground. She felt one arm wobble, then both arms swung out to the side, dropping her to the mat with a thump.

“Oof!” she muttered, her breath knocked out for a moment. A face appeared hovering over her.

“Hey, are you alright? You probably shouldn't be taking all of those things at once, you know; you could sprain something.” the young man smiled at her, and offered his hand to help her up.

She grunted, and pulled herself to her feet. “Thanks. I used to be able to do that. I guess several years of spending three days a week behind a desk have kind of wrecked my flexibility.”

“Oh, you'll get it back in no time, you were doing pretty well until the rings,” he commented. “By the way, I'm Carter.”

Dejah laughed, and shook his hand. “Carter of Mars?”

“Yeah, well, what can I say, my parents were big Burroughs fans.” He grinned, and looked slightly embarassed.

“Mine, too. Dejah Sorenson.”

“Oh, so you're Sorenson!”

She shook her head. “Everyone keeps saying that. There is no way I'm really that famous, I haven't done anything yet!”

Carter shrugged, and Dejah's eyes were caught by a dragon tattoo on his shoulder. “Yeah, well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? We're all waiting to see if you're going to be able to do it. And anyway, Bradbury is a lot like a small town, and news travels fast. And the Heritage PR department has spent a lot of time talking the mission up, so yeah, you'll be pretty well known here. Don't worry though, as long as you don't try to slack off, everyone will be pretty accepting. Names and fame don't matter too much here, just what you can do.”

She looked at him for a moment. “You seem awfully young, are you a University student?”

He laughed, and shook his head. “No, I didn't have the grades for the University, so I couldn't get a sponsorship. I ended up in a school for mechanics here, and it's really been great. I probably wouldn't have lasted in school any way, I have a hard time sitting still. I'd rather be taking things apart to see how they work.”

“There seem to be an awful lot of mechanics here. I don't think I ever met any in Spirit City.”

“Oh, they were there. You probably just weren't working in an area where your paths would cross much. But there's a huge demand for mechanics on Mars right now. There's all kinds of machines here: rovers, transports, shuttles, big rigs, you name it. And that dust gets into absolutely everything, and causes all kinds of problems, so it takes a lot of manpower to keep everyhting tuned up and running. And there are more vehicles per capita in Bradbury Dome than in any other city, so it's not too surprising that so many of us end up here.” Carter dipped his hands in the nearby bowl of chalk, and brushed the excess powder off. “Well, I think I'm going to get started on the rings here, if you don't mind. It was really good to meet you!”

“Yes, the same here!” Dejah shook her head slightly while leaving the room. He was attractive, there was no doubt about it, but she was at least ten years older.

“What a shame.” she remarked as she headed for the showers.

Dejah's arms ached as she unlocked her apartment that night, and she could feel pain beginning to settle into her back and shoulders.

“Yeah, I'm going to need a lot more exercise,” she groaned, twisting to try to loosen up the muscles. She was reaching down to try to touch her toes, when her communicator beeped, and she picked it up.

“One message,” the little screen read, “from Nathan Chandrayaan. Read now or ignore?” She hesitated for a moment, then punched the “read now” button.

The screen blinked, and several lines of text came into view.

“Hey Dej, glad to hear you go to Bradbury safely. Sorry for the way we left things. Miss you like crazy. Call me when you can. Nathan.”

She paused, feeling the old storm of feelings welling up inside again. She ran a thumb over the comm's control pad, trying to decide what to do. Finally, she tossed the unit on her bed, and resumed stretching.

What do my characters look like?

2009-11-11T14:32:00.000-08:00

Wanna know how I see my characters? Here they are!

1. Dejah Sorenson. This is exactly what she looks like, no changes. The actress was sort of the inspiration for the character.

2. Nathan Chandrayaan
You might notice that this is the guy who plays Raj on Big Bang Theory. Nathan's skin is actually darker than this, but other than that, he's about right.

3. Maxwell Hamm

Max isn't quite as pretty as this dude, and his hair is redder, but this is pretty close.

A few NaNo notes

2009-11-04T14:06:00.002-08:00

1. Please excuse inconsistencies and poor spelling/grammar. I'm writing this ridiculously quickly, and don't do any editing.

2. The numbers you see at the beginnings of some paragraphs indicate years. I need to change them, because given the space industries current difficulties, there's no way we could get colonies on Mars that quickly. I'll change them in the second draft.

A Dream of Mars

2009-08-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

In 2008, thousands of people fell in love with a robot, far from its home, out in the cold of space. No, not Wall-E: the Mars Explorer, nicknamed “Phoenix.” Aside from its obvious purposes of space exploration and study, the Mars Explorer was also a new step for NASA when it became one of the most followed accounts on Twitter. In early November, the Explorer ceased communicating with Earth, but not before creating a massive following, and capturing the hearts of thousands. Some of the last few Tweets from the Explorer(written by Veronica McGregor of Jet Propulsion Laboratory) were very poignant:

I should stay well-preserved in this cold. I'll be humankind's monument here for centuries, eons, until future explorers come for me ;-) 1:57 AM Oct 30th, 2008 from web

Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW! 12:55 PM Oct 30th, 2008 from web

Many of the Explorer’s followers on Twitter expressed amazement that they were getting so emotional over a robot, especially when everyone knew the messages were coming from JPL, not the surface of Mars. Why get worked up over a machine that was slowly shutting down?

It wasn’t the machine itself that we loved: the metals, the mechanisms, the scientific equipment. It was the human spirit that had sent it there, so many miles from our home, not for profit or war or necessity, but simply because there was a chance to discover something we’d never known before. So many people had dreamed, had planned, had worked to put that bit of metal on that frozen surface, and the light of the human spirit shone as bright as any star. The freezing chill of Martian winter may have caused the machine to shut down, but the spirit it embodies is still there, as strong as ever, burning bright with curiosity, determination, and optimism.

In January, I visited Jet Propulsions Lab, and got to meet many of the people behind the Mars missions; many of them were kind enough to sign my copy of The Martian Chronicles. And it hit me. The dream still lives on. Would we be so excited to discover Martian ice if we had never read about Martian canals full of wine? Would we have been so excited to see the cold red dust of the surface if we had not walked the streets of its cities with Dejah Thoris and John Carter? The dream isn’t about finding aliens, or seeing ancient Martian cities, or any of the specifics from the books and stories. The dream is the Red Planet itself, that bright shining dot in the night sky, the cold barren world of shifting sands and sublimating ice. The dream doesn’t die with the discovery of fact; the dream is the power behind that discovery.

Ray Bradbury, that dreamer of Mars, said “We're always asking, ‘What are we doing here on earth?’ We are the audience. There's no use having a universe, a cosmology, if you don't have witnesses. We are the witnesses to the miracle. We are put here by creation, by God, by the cosmos, whatever name you want to give it. We're here to be the audience to the magnificent. It is our job to celebrate.”

We have sent machines hurtling through millions of miles of space to discover the face of Mars. We have seen the red earth. We have touched the ice below the surface. We are the audience to the magnificent, and we will celebrate.

Phoenix

2009-08-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

In honor of the Mars Phoenix, now silent in the Martian winter.

The frigid wind whipped the icy sand against her helmet as she rounded the small rock outcropping. She staggered for a moment before regaining her balance and pushed forward. Her communicator crackled.
“Eagle1, you ok out there?”
She activated the transmitter, and responded.
“Everything’s fine out here, Eagle2. Just a few more metres.”
“Better hurry. They’re talking about calling you back. They don’t know if you’ll be able to stay in contact once you get there.”
“The only way they’re getting me to come back is to come after me themselves.”
The signal crackled, and faded. She assumed Williams had signed off, and pressed forward.

A glint sparkled momentarily through the dust. She squinted, and adjusted the polarization of her visor. The Martian landscape was still bare here near the poles: no-one had yet found it profitable to construct a dome this far north. Her communicator crackled again.
“Eagle1, report.”
“Eagle2, I think I’ve found the site. Gotta get closer to check.”
“Eagle1, you have been ordered to return to your vehicle and begin the return to base.”
“With all due respect, Eagle2, screw you.”
“Why is this *crackle* important to you? It’s a beatup piece of junk. Went 90 days, then a few more 2 years later, then silence. Even if you find it, it’s of no use to us. *crackle* obsolete 75 years ago.”

She could now see a small structure half buried in dust and ice. The distant sun glinted sharply off several of its surfaces. Though her suit was fully heated, she felt a chill go down her spine.

“Eagle2, my grandmother was one of the people who used the original primitive network. She loved it. She had friends all over the world. She followed the progress of this one. She used to tell me stories, about how she would get excited to see what this machine was doing each day, to look at the pictures it sent from hundreds of millions of miles away. When she told about how it was settling in to freeze in 2008, and the messages that were posted about it…she still got tears in her eyes. It meant something to her.”

A long silence settled in, and she pushed her way the last few feet. Reaching out a hand, she brushed a bit of dust from the surface, and felt an electric thrill as her gloved fingers came in contact with the ancient artifact.

“*crackle* over a machine?!”
She smiled, as she rested a hand on the cold, ancient metal. “No. It wasn’t the machine. She said the machine was only the place in which the human spirit, human curiousity, and human endeavor dwelt. Here they were, just learning to reach out to each other, but they still wanted the stars. Think of the time and learning and brilliance it took to put this here. And they flung it out into the stars, knowing it would cease, knowing it would die alone on a distant planet…and they did it anyway.”

With a click, she silenced the communicator. She would deal with Base in a minute. She caressed the metal, and smiled.

“We came back for you. “

The wind whistled.

“Phoenix.”