Autumn on Mars

A science fiction novelette by Matthew Crane.

A Modern Odyssey, Chapter 1: Out Into The Wilds

It was a quiet morning, but with what we were about to do, things would be far from dull.

I glanced across the cold steel hangar and no one was there, the camera was idling… everything was going just as I thought it would.
I cunningly gestured, then snuck over the gap to get my hands on the closest rover, just under the door. Searching for a gap that I knew I could just about slip my glove through.
“Are you really sure you really know how to drive rovers, Trip?” Mika asked from behind me. She seemed to have a little bit of doubt in her voice.
“Yeah, dad lets me do it all the time Mika” I nodded reassuringly backwards at my younger sister as I pried a panel open and pulled, “Come on”.
The rover’s airlock door slid back across the hull, but I’m pretty sure we pushed inside before it could even reach the end of its track.

It shut behind us.

The cabin in a rover can be kind of claustrophobic but we both knew our way around them well. Still I pointed Mika at the navigator’s seat, just in case, before I strapped myself into the driving seat. I’ve been in rovers a whole lot, and the driver’s seat more than they’d want, but this time it felt different. Like there was a rush inside of special energy swooping up into me from it. Kind of like the rush of the air also coming in at about the same time.

I pulled my helmet off and threw it somewhere.
“This is soooo cool!” Mika looked over as she rolled her helmet onto her knees.
I feigned a shrug, but she could see that i was grinning.
“Dad lets me drive the rover all the time”
“No Way!” said Mika.
“Yes he does” I retorted, “hold this” and I pulled off a panel under the console to dive into.
“Now normally I wouldn’t be allowed to drive a rover like this…”
“Because you’re only 12?”
“Yes, because I’m only 12 Mika. But that’s because of that big computer up there” I said and pointed up at the dashboard.
Success! My hands closed around a switch within the console and twisted it on. In a snap the rover’s power plant behind us began to hum.
“But dad says every rover has to have a way to turn itself on without the control unit, like this” I explained…
As I grabbed a second switch, buttons and gauges around the cockpit began to illuminate Mika’s glasses as she watched me.
“It’s so people aren’t stuck if there’s an accident” I smiled to my sister as she watched closely, “and it’s how dad lets me drive so I can train to be an explorer, just like mum”

Just like mum.

I easily slipped the rover into drive, I knew what I was doing, and soon the whir of their motors and the sound of the wheels were quickly lost in the thin atmosphere, so no one even knew what was happening as we escaped from the hanger.

 

As I saw the rover had passed the west gate of Coldbrook I was only getting more tingly inside. I’d never been out of the colony unsupervised before, so it was a pretty big deal to me then, and I had to take one of my hands of the wheel just to keep my foot down on the pedal. My muscles always feel like they’re bursting with electricity when I’m doing stuff like this, and this was the biggest thing-like-this I’d ever done.

Mika looked up at me.
“How will we find them, Trip?” she asked.
I laughed.
You see, I’ve never been that good at working out how to do things before I get to them, normally I just go at them till I’ve worked them out. But when I think hard about stuff I have this habit of twisting my head to the side. It’s silly but it helps me focus on things inside my head while my eyes blur out the world and my inner voice starts talking…

“Trip!”

I snapped back out, “Huh?”
“You’re turning the rover too much!” Mika told me, exasperatedly.

She was right. I was lucky that the rover hadn’t done anything more than a little swerve. But after that I ended up holding the wheel a little bit tighter.
“Sorry Mika!”
“It’s ok. If you can’t look I can watch out for you” she said, and smiled at me, and I smiled back. Having her there relaxed me quite a bit.

The one thing better than being alone is being alone with a friend.

Mum had told me that long ago. My Mum had said a lot of clever things, I think about her words a lot.
“Suggestive of a spider’s web seen against the grass of a spring morning, which cross the globe from one pole to the other. These are the Martian canals”. Those were the words she had said to a nervous little seven year old, long ago as we both climbed the ramp to embark for our new home.

I said it again, myself, out loud. And when I said it, a spark of an idea lit up my eyes, as it had back then.
“If people could see the canals with telescopes looking down from earth, then if we go up high, we should them too” I said, then glanced back to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to steer.
“That’s clever” My genius sister smiled, then suddenly, excitedly turned to me “The Blue Mountains! They are… over five thousand and two hundred meters high, and…”
I looked east. Of course, it seemed so obvious. They were really far away from us, but the ridge still managed to stand as a big, jagged, dark, imposing wall below the rising sun, like it did every morning.

From up there, we both knew there would be nothing we couldn’t see.

“…third peak from the north, and that’s five thousand, two hundred and ninety two meters…” Mika continued.
“Thanks. That’s brilliant Mika!”

“Thanks for coming along”
“Hmm. Thank you for letting me come, Trip”

 

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