The Four Fingers of Death (48 page)

Steve Watanabe, when he heard these enfeebled rationalizations, which have been much fleshed out in my account, felt that Brandon was not himself. There was no gratitude for his having made a drive of many days on a forklift. And Steve was not reassured by the dull, lifeless tone with which Brandon directed him to the grinding and milling tools. They were to drill in the eastern outflow channel of the Valles Marineris, technically known by another one of those creepy Greek names, the Ius Chasma. The Ius Chasma, you’ll recall, is about three and a half miles beneath the plains into which it is carved, running parallel to it the Tithonium Chasma, which gets so narrow it’s just like a big crack in the ground, except that the crack goes down miles. Between the two is a ridge that runs along the center. Ius is about four hundred miles long, but it’s only a tiny portion of the enormous Valles Marineris complex, which I have already said is about as far across as the United States. In most of it, you wouldn’t even know you were
in
a canal. Not so here at Ius. You see a canyon wall that’s miles high, you don’t forget it.

Steve and Brandon had got down twenty-five feet or so, into the bottom of one of the chasm walls, and they were digging mostly into basalt. These were the kinds of environments, however, according to the Martian surveillance satellites, where you found salt beds and, in some cases,
dampness
. The evolving theory—that there were periodic underground aquifers that had in the past caused catastrophic flooding on Mars—provided for, indeed
required
, spots of dampness. That water had to carve out those canyons somehow, and it wasn’t all evaporated. It couldn’t be. A team of geologists back in Florida watching all of this on a video screen cheered for every new foot of exposed crust. Much of this work, excepting the occasional buzz and roar of drilling automata, was done in silence and darkness. Steve, according to the notes he was posting, tried to engage Brandon periodically, but Brandon would no longer participate in the subtler human interactions. Brandon, former boxer and smartass, had, in the weeks alone, become a grim, silent wraith. When there was a lapse in the pace of operations, he would berate Steve until Steve was willing to get back to work, and the only thing that Steve could seem to do to get time off was to faint from exertion, which he did periodically. The deprivation of sunlight in the chasm was somehow even more obliterating than he imagined it might be on Earth, since it was the last thing he felt he had in common with those he missed back home: sunlight.

They had a rope-and-pulley system that led down into the godforsaken hole in the ground, and a heat lamp that they used to keep warm, and they ran it off the battery of the rover, via reinforced extension cord, and there was a small generator, and it was in this half-light that Steve saw Brandon’s grimy face, as Brandon pulled off his visor and attempted to
taste
the salt they were blasting away from the walls of the excavation site in a storage drum. Brandon
tasted
it. There was some kind of liquid there, undeniably, and the action of the drills, the friction of it, was liquefying some of what was frozen.

“You aren’t drinking that, are you?”

“Keep drilling. It’s sterile.”

“Seriously, are you sure you should be drinking that?”

“Drinking what?”

“Weren’t you just drinking some of that stuff coming off the walls?”

Brandon, in his relentless monotone: “There’s water here. I’m verifying. We’ll be reporting back to Earth.”

“You’re not going to be doing very much verifying if you catch some germ.”

“Conductors. Radioactive material. That’s our brief. No germs.”

There was, however, the possibility of geological collapse. That was another peril. The Valles Marineris had all kinds of collapses. There were entire canyons in the complex of Valles Marineris that were sealed off because the walls had collapsed, and when you were digging at the base of miles of canyon wall, trying to get down a hundred meters, to the beginning of the aquifer, in search of
Martian life
, or in search of some new kind of raw material for semiconductors, it was not unreasonable to assume that there might have been or could be again a collapse. Hebes Chasma had a collapse. It was sealed off. And the way the wind blew in there, there were all kinds of erosion taking place all the time. And Steve worried ceaselessly about when the others were going to come for them. In what way would they come? Would they come in the ultralight? In a ragtag army? Flown in and air-dropped in a secure perimeter? And when they came, in what way would they mete out Martian justice, that resource which only begins to obtain when a certain critical mass of human beings,
a community
, is present? In what form would justice be dispatched, and who would be the duly appointed jurist?

At sunset, when the batteries were run down on the drills, the two trudged out of the cave to load the last of the minerals into the drums on the back of the rover. Deimos, the second moon, hung in the salmony sky.

In the rover, besides the drums of ore, there were piles of slag, a silvery, reflective muck that definitely had some liquid in it. Whether it was water, or chemical runoff, or what, was unclear. The whole mining operation, like most of Mars, smelled awful, smelled like a sulfur refinery. Steve and Brandon were meant to carry a half ton of the rock back to base camp, where it would ultimately be loaded into the Earth Return Vehicle for the trip home. Assuming they could somehow commandeer the ERV. Steve, according to his diaries, was weary in ways he had not been since landing on the Red Planet, and he wished he could be sure that he was doing the right thing, that cooperation with the
authorized
mission would be the way to secure things for his family back on Earth. But he wasn’t sure, and this lack of certainty was made worse when he got a good look at Brandon that day, in the remaining sunlight. Brandon, who despite his capacity for vainglory and ethnic one-liners was sort of hale and squeaky clean, now looked like a different person. His skin had become leathery and gray, and his eyes were sunken into his head. And they were
black
around the rims.

“Brandon, are you
feeling
all right?”

Brandon didn’t say anything, and his heartless and empty glare in reply to the question didn’t inspire confidence. Steve didn’t bother to pursue it. That was when, in looking up for another glimpse of Deimos, the hummingbird of the solar system’s moons, Steve saw it; he saw how justice was going to be pursued and who, exactly, was going to be doing the pursuing. Jim Rose. The captain. Up above Steve now, and coming straight for them in the ultralight, swooping down out of the sky as though it would be easy to land an ultralight in the middle of a canyon, which perhaps it would be, was none other than Captain Jim Rose. The identity of the pilot was easy enough to surmise.

There was a volume of sand on the floor of the canyon, and a thick carpeting of dust. Not like the rocky plains out where the three spacecraft had done their awkward touchdowns. This was where the ultralight came down, like a flaming eagle out of some interminable Wagnerian opus. The ultralight was easier to fly on Mars, if you believed the hype about a meager supply of gravity and no magnetic poles to speak of. It was borne aloft on the rather manic winds. The ultralight came down out of the sky and seemed to merge with its own shadow in the deep red of sunset, and with it now came the blast, at the site of the rover. There was impact. Blast and heat, enough to knock over the one drum full of silicon oxide and related geological treasures, which in turn toppled over the other that was waiting to be picked up with the hydraulic lift, and two or three days of mined riches spilled out into the sand. The barest portion of the recent treasures collected. The projectile, the missile that caused this damage, was some incendiary device, a container of corn-based ethanol perhaps, from the ultralight, which, like the rover, operated with solar cells but which required a little gas to get aloft.

Steve went facedown, hoping to avoid shrapnel, and when he got up, he could see Brandon was trying to pat down his flaming suit. Steve grabbed a blanket that he’d dragged out of the rover earlier, when trying to get a nap, and hurried to Brandon’s side to wrap him in it. This while Jim Rose, avenger, walked toward them, the wild Martian winds compassing about him, from the beached aircraft.

There were a number of things to consider for Steve Watanabe, in the moments he had at his disposal. There was enough juice in the rover to go a little bit. And there was, about ten miles south, a route out of the Ius Chasma. There had been a collapse there, ten or so million years ago, and the wind had eroded the channel down enough that Brandon had found himself able, he’d told Steve, to get the rover in and out. This was the one way, short of driving thousands of miles in one direction or several hundred in another, to get out of the Valles Marineris quickly,
if you couldn’t fly
. But what would happen if Steve and Brandon just drove off? What would happen with the important scientific work they had recently done, not to mention the gathering of ore necessary for a whole new breed of cybernetic semiconductor, at the behest of levelheaded administrators back home, if they absconded? What would happen, Steve thought, to this work they’d been doing on behalf of a large digital operating systems consortium based in Kuala Lumpur, and its American affiliate in Dallas? Brandon did have a Taser that had been provided by NASA for self-defense, and which he and Steve had been advised to employ as needed.

Brandon’s inclination, it seemed, was to tackle the problem mano a mano. Despite mild burns. And Jim Rose seemed to have no better idea himself. The two of them fell upon each other. Steve Watanabe, who, unlike his colleagues here on the Mars mission, had not been in and out of the military in Central Asia, had only rudimentary combat training. He was a Buddhist. In fact, as a kid, he’d never come out on the winning end in any fight. He was the kind of boy, by virtue of excellent skills in areas that others disdained (cello, chemistry, velvet paintings), who had always come in for a lot of racially dubious ribbing about how
easy
it all was for him, and he had attempted to defend himself physically on certain occasions with disappointing results. He’d had a couple of teeth knocked out; he’d bloodied his nose, even had it reset once. He took these lumps and moved on, more wary and a little bit more hapless about the world.

Steve’s inclination, therefore, was to escape with the rover, as soon as it was feasible, and to head the ten miles south, hugging the wall of the canyon, where it would be very difficult for the ultralight to follow. Eventually, the plane was going to run out of fuel. Because some of its fuel had already been used to fashion the impressive Molotov cocktail. The ultralight stayed aloft during the day with its solar panels, but the sun was all but set. It was going to get very cold very soon.

Two men bent on doing each other harm. Even under the best of circumstances, such a thing can be a drawn-out and unpleasant affair, and Steve, in his later report to NASA, did not give an account of every blow and counterblow. We know that Brandon was once a welterweight, and he was probably good on his feet, especially with the gravity only about two-thirds what it was back on Earth, so that the dancing and feinting of this prizefight was like some fabulous ethnic ritual, or like one of the fight sequences from old Hong Kong action films, whose only raison d’être was holding gravity in abeyance. Nothing was more impressive, when the goal was insuring the stock valuation of a large Malaysian entertainment provider, than the cessation of the law of gravity. And that’s what this fight was like, with Brandon bobbing around and using, Steve supposed, some very traditional pugilistic combinations. Meanwhile, how
inhuman
, how cold, how expedient was Brandon’s antagonist. Jim Rose had no compunction about making sure his style, as a combatant, was about forcing total and unconditional submission. There was going to be no prolonged mixing it up. In the dusky light, it seemed as though he’d seized one of Brandon’s arms and had
bit down
on it, shoving the forearm into his mouth and chomping.

Brandon squealed and somersaulted out of the way, behind the end of the rover, so as to put the vehicle between them. Whereupon, in the interval available, Brandon seemed to be squatting down to look for a rock of some kind. It was at this point in the conflict that Brandon, who had treated Steve as if he were an indentured servant, called his name. “Steve! Steve!” I have no more details than that, just Steve’s name. And then Brandon heaved some small piece of volcanic rock at Jim Rose, striking him in the solar plexus without much apparent effect. The two warriors breathed great gasping breaths, because they were running short of oxygen as Jim worked his way around the rover, and when they fell against each other, mountain goat style, they clutched and clawed, in an attempt to wrestle each other to the ground.