Champion of Mars (17 page)

“How will I find the Librarian?”

“The answer to that and your passage to him lie in the same place. Follow me. We have little time.”

CHAPTER TEN

Wonderland

O
N
W
EDNESDAY, HIS
fourth day at Ascraeus, Holland was taken into the caves. Early in the morning, he and his teammates ate a large breakfast. The walk to base camp took around five hours, so they were to be there two nights; breakfast was their last chance at real food for a while. Eggs, fresh bread, tomatoes, and beans – all Mars-grown. The food was good, and nutritionally balanced, but it would not be long before Holland was ready to kill for a steak.

His team was a foursome: he, Stulynow, Vance – who was to monitor his physical and psychological reactions to the cave environment – and, to his irritation, the base’s Class Three.

“Can’t be helped, I’m afraid. The carriage goes on all the expeditions, and she rides it all the way down on those where we have new team members,” said Maguire on the way down to Deep Two. “Don’t mind it, though, you’ll forget she’s there. Stuly’s the best cave expert we have, and he’s a bloody good guide. Two things that man is enthusiastic about: drinking and caves. I can’t wait for you to see it.”

Maguire said a lot on the trip. Holland paid him little attention; his mind was on other matters. Maguire either did not notice or did not mind.

Holland had seen video of the caves, and had explored a portion of them in a somewhat lacklustre virtspace – it was low resolution, and far from immersive. He figured this was for two reasons: first, full immersion in an environment that could simultaneously explode, choke, burn and freeze you would be excruciatingly painful, even in a virtspace. Second, if Marsform exhibited the caves’ glories for all to see, then they’d have a whole lot more people complaining about the possible extinction of everything inside.

Holland had an inkling of the disparity between the bland VR and the reality. He’d had some samples of the lifeforms in his laboratory. He’d seen how industrious Mars’ chemotrophs were, and that had been out of their natural habitat.

Suiting up under the watchful eyes of Jensen took forever. Holland was made to remove his survival undersuit and re-don it before he was allowed into the hard shell cave gear. They each had their own undersuit. The hard shells, of which there were five, were shared.

“No, no, no,” said Jensen, slapping Holland’s hands away. “The undersuit on its own can keep you alive for a few days, but only if worn properly. Compressing the recycling systems by improper wear severely reduces their operational span, and it must maintain even pressure or your soft tissues will swell in the event of hard shell failure.” He fiddled at Holland’s undersuit and stood back. “There,” he said.

Jensen took the opportunity to lecture all of them on the correct safety procedures for a solid half an hour. Holland was made to recite the location and usage of all the hard shell suit’s emergency equipment: quick release for its chest and back plates, alkali wash for acid contamination, medical packs, rapid foam patching gear, spares for water and air scrubbers... the list was long and Jensen made him go over it twice.

“You, Doctors Vance and Stulynow. All well and good to stand there with those long faces. It will do you no harm to listen to this again. You may have the supply mules and the android, but should there be a cave-in and you are trapped, the equipment in the hard shells is all you will have between you and a lingering death.”

“I am listening, Dr Jensen,” said Dr Vance steadily.

“Well, I am not, you Viking bore. Get on with it,” said Stulynow.

Jensen gave him a hard stare and went back to asking Holland his endless list of questions, then made him repack his equipment case.

The point where they plugged the hard shell directly into his interface port was particularly unpleasant.

Finally, Jensen was finished. They sealed the hard shells. Maguire tapped Holland on the shoulder. His vision was restricted to a one-hundred-and-seventy-degree arc in front of him, and he had to clump round to look Maguire in the face.

“I’ll be watching everything from the control suite with Jensen, don’t you worry, Holly,” said Maguire. He held his hand up, thumb and forefinger pressed together in an ‘okay’ signal. Maguire and Jensen left the suit space. The door back into the station hissed as the seal engaged.

“We will now check suit system telemetry,” said Jensen from the observation suite. Data displays flashed on, crowding the suit visor’s periphery. Tiny windows with a view of the observation suite and images from Stulynow, Vance and the android’s cameras, perfect as jewels, were stacked on the top right. Holland cycled through them, bringing Stulynow’s POV to the top as he would be leading the way. Cave maps, locational data, seismic readings, atmospheric composition, video capture, VR logging, Grid link (if he wished to see the Martian Grid’s contents, rather than having it forced into his head; he was grateful for that). Drop-down menus gave access to more data. Jensen instructed him to access a random selection of data sets and apps with his implant.

“That all seems to be working,” Jensen said.

“Don’t forget, Holly, you can customise what you have up on your dashboard. You can save your own profile so whatever suit you are in in future, it will boot up with your preferences. It’s only like having a new phone, it is.”

“We recommend, however, that you keep all environmental information locked in as presented,” said Jensen. “Stulynow, is your team ready?”

“
Da
,” said Stulynow. He stepped round the other two, awkward in the confined space of the suiting room, and checked each of them over. “See anything wrong, Jensen?”

“All is in order,” said Jensen.

“Let’s go,” said Stulynow.

The door to the lava tube rolled open. They walked outside, over to the racks of equipment and inactive near-I mules. One, loaded with food and water, whirred into life and got unsteadily to its feet, followed by a second, bearing heavier gear. The mules had no real front or back. They were headless, both sets of legs identical, jointed oppositely to each other, but someone had stuck a stuffed donkey head to one end of the lead mule. It was dirty and had a number of small holes melted into it.

“Where’s the android?” said Stulynow.

“I am here,” said Cybele’s perfect voice. She strode out from the equipment store, wearing a sheath Holland had not seen before. It was heavier than her usual, its paint scratched, metal pitted with acid burns.

“Her cave body,” said Stulynow. He tapped the chest plate of his suit. “Aluminium. Some of the methanogens down there eat through plastics, even modern latticed carbon, like grandmothers go through chocolates.”

They went to the large airlock sealing the beginnings of the cave system from Deep Two’s chamber. Toothed doors unlocked from one another. They stepped through and the doors slid shut. No fans activated, there was no need for them on the way in. The doors were not there to regulate pressure, but to keep Wonderland’s methane from reaching Deep Two.

The outer doors re-engaged with a
clunk
, and the inner doors opened. From here Holland could see the path down as a chain of lights, leading out from the tube, into the first cavern, and then on into the darkness.

“Into the rabbit hole,” said Vance. She clipped herself, then Holland, to the safety line.

“Welcome to Heaven,” said Stulynow laconically. “Or Hell. It depends on how you feel about caves.”

Stulynow set out, and the others followed. Holland was growing more surefooted in Martian gravity, but the steps daunted him in the bulky hard shell. He took them slowly, Vance helping him down, Cybele standing at the bottom in case he should fall. He went over to the silicon formation, and began taking pictures and chemical readings from it with his suit.

There was a lot of laughing.

“Er, John?” said Maguire. Holland looked up to see him watching behind the observation suite’s window. “I wouldn’t bother with that. There’s plenty more of that lower down.”

“You really don’t know what to expect?” said Stulynow.

“No,” said Holland. “Not really.”

“Let me show you, my new friend Dr Holland.”

Their descent began in earnest.

T
HE PATH RAN
down through caves stacked one atop the other. The caves followed what had been veins of sulphur deposited by the volcano; these had been eaten out by the lifeforms, leaving nothing but acid-scarred basalt. Now there was little living in the upper caves. A few small examples of the fairy castles, as the team called them, were the only things visible to the eye. In places, other mineral structures left by microbes coated the walls or the floors, but, confused by deposits leached in from the surface, they were little use for study.

“Life here dates from a time when Mars still had a hydrological cycle,” said Holland.

“Yes,” said Vance. “Not much alive this high up. Some methanogens cracking CO
₂
from the air. Without the sulphur oxidisers, the biome is limited. They’re the foundation.”

Some of the caverns were stupendous in size. The old magma chambers and inflationary caves, mixed in with spaces full of the evidence of past biotic activity, fractured into crazed labyrinths where microbes had eaten away the rock. Holland’s suit lights often did not hit the far wall. He felt dwarfed by the scale of it. The weight of the shield volcano above them vanished in his mind. It was not possible to reconcile the size of Ascraeus Mons with the spaces beneath it.

After two hours, Stulynow stopped. “We are coming to what we call the Chasm. We are fifteen thousand and fifty metres under the peak of the Mons. To our right, we’ll be skirting along an old magma chamber, drained when Ascraeus moved away from the Tharsis plume. Be really careful on the lip. You fall in there, and we’ll never see you again.”

“Just ‘The Chasm’?”

“Yes,” said Stulynow dourly, “because it’s the biggest damn hole in the ground you will ever see.”

“Stuly, this is something amazing. Can’t you build it up a little bit?” said Vance.

“It is what it is.”

“You are a miserable, miserable man,” said Vance.

“It is the Russian in me, I told you this many times.”

They went down a short flight of stairs into a lesser cave. At the base was a doorway carved into the rock, lights and EM relays on both sides of it. The safety line was broken by the door, the carbon cable giving way to a steel one anchored on the far side.

“It may seem stupid to put this here,” said Stulynow. He pointed to two unfinished doorways. “We tried to find another way down, but this rock is broken by vertical conduits and faulting that made it impossible. Following the edge of the chasm made it easier to bring in bridging materials to get over the lesser gaps. The outgassing was also easier to trace here. Without the Chasm we might never have found the major biome. So, as you say, swings and carousels.”

“Roundabouts,” said Holland. “We say ‘roundabouts.’”

“Yes. Those. Jensen?”

“Yes.” Jensen’s voice crackled.

“We are about to walk the chasm.”

Holland followed Stulynow through the doorway. “Unclipping,” Stulynow said as he unclipped Holland’s suit harness.

“Affirmative,” said Jensen.

Stulynow moved the carabiner to the steel wire on the other side of the door. “Clipping,” he said as he reattached it. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” said Holland.

Stulynow chuckled drily. “No you’re not.”

They walked out, Vance following Holland, Cybele and the mules bringing up the rear. The path followed a tunnel a short way, then opened up into nothing.

“Oh, Christ,” said Holland.

To his right was an immense void, the far side barely visible, the top a mess of rock cubes hanging from the ceiling in defiance of gravity.

“I’d say do not look down,” said Stulynow, “only you can’t see the bottom. Even with that.” He indicated a powerful lamp on a gimbal mounted on the wall. “We’ve five hundred metres of this to go.”

“Stay steady, Holland, it’s over quicker than you might think.” Maguire spoke over the suit radio.

“I’m fine with heights, really,” said Holland.

But this was more than a height, and Holland’s stomach flipped. The path clung to a thin ledge, widened when necessary by catwalks bolted to the stone. It did not take long before Holland was eyeing each and every bolt as if it would suddenly turn suicidal and cast them all into the dark. Only two thin cables, the guideline to his right and the safety line to his left, stood between him and the Chasm. By the time they’d reached the end, he stood on shaky legs.

“Adrenaline rush? Told you. Scares the shit out of me, and I have been here two dozen times,” said Stulynow.

“The worst of it is over,” said Vance. She put a hand on Holland’s elbow and peered earnestly up at him from the depths of her helmet. “From now on we’ve just got the stair, and then we’re into Wonderland. From there it’s thirty minutes to the base camp.”

“Our doctor does have a nice side,” said Stulynow.

“Fuck you, you aggravating Russian,” said Vance. There was little real annoyance to it.

“I tell you, every day...”

“Your mother was a Buryat?” said Holland.

Stulynow smiled, teeth showing in the light of his helmet. “Exactly. Now, as Vanchetchka says, we go down the stair.”

The stair was a maze – ancient pressure domes, vertical conduits, lesser lava chambers and biotic cavities stepped on top of each other. Some of them were the beginnings of lava tubes, and led off to who knew where.

“We have explored precisely none of these deeper tubes,” said Stulynow. “Needs people, or fully autonomous robotic units. We’re shit out of both. There’s life in a lot of them, we’ve got the gas traces to prove it. Anything could be down there.”

Natural cracks between the caverns had been widened by machine or blasted open. They went down quickly, and the air temperature rose. Holland could not feel it beneath his suit’s insulation, but his thermometer crawled up from minus figures into the low plusses. The air composition changed: less carbon dioxide, more methane. The walls took on hues of chemical brightness, the remnant ecology becoming progressively more active the lower they went. Dripping strings of mucus appeared on the ceilings, colonies of sulphur-loving bacteria. There was more moisture in the air, and the ground became slippery underfoot. Holland wondered how his boot soles were faring – the wetness was sulphuric acid dripped by the snottites. Fairy castles became more common, until they were walking through rooms full of glittering formations.