Your last letter was wonderful, Thank You! :-) I'm sorry if my
letters aren't as frequent as you'd like them to be, but to be
honest I'm still getting used to having a pen pal, and as I've
never even had a pen pal here on Mars - even though my father
keeps nagging me to write to one of the kids down in Argyre
having a pen pal on Earth is pretty amazing. Oh, and I did as
you suggested and looked for you on a map, but instead of
looking on the net I dusted off my mother's old atlas (printed
on real paper!) and looked for Orkney the old-fashioned way and
there they were, a little cluster of islands just off the
north-eastern coast of Scotland... and there was your island,
Sanday, and you're right, it *does* look like Valles Marineris!
Since you wrote I've been away from home for a couple of days,
on a school trip. I know I never said anything about it last
time; it was a big surprise to me actually, it came out of
nowhere, or I would have warned you I'd be away and out of
contact.
So, where have I been? Well, I've been almost as far away from
Chryse as I've ever been before - out into the Far Outback, on
a hunting expediton! No, nothing to do with Mars Heritage this
time sadly, though I believe my Team (it feels good to be able
to talk about My Team now! :-) ) is on the shortlist for the
next draft to clean-up the Santa Maria site in a month's time
(cross your fingers for me, you can imagine just how high
prestige a job it is, tidying the landing site of the first
manned expedition to Mars!). No, I got back yesterday from a
field trip up to the crater Lyot, which lies far north and east
of here, in the deep desert of Vasitas Borealis (rough
translation: the Great Northern Plain), because my entire senior
class was drafted in to assist a planetary geology field squad
on a Hunt...
... a meteorite hunt.
Mars is an excellent place for collecting meteorites Callum.
We're something of a meteorite magnet. Because we're caught
between the Sun and the asteroid belt we get lots of what the
scientists call "debris infall"; out in the Belt asteroids are
colliding and chipping bits off each other all the time, and
those chips of rock and melted globs of metal are pulled
towards the Sun by its gravity. But they have to get past us
first, and many don't. Meteorites land here all the time, many
more than do there on Earth, but the problem is this planet is
so huge (only half Earth's size, I *know*, but we have no
oceans here remember, so although we're only half your size we
have an equal area of land... and no trees or lakes to hide
falling starstones! :-) ) and its landscape is so rugged that
they're very hard to find. A lot of the surface is very hard,
exposed bedrock, so anything that hits it either shatters into
minute fragments or is vapourised completely.
But there is some softer ground, with dust dunes and wells to
cushion infall, so single meteorites *are* out there to be
found, and often are, but usually only the big ones - and by
"big" I mean bigger than your hand - are stumbled upon by
people outside, just because they stood out from the surface
clutter. And you've seen the pics, there's lots of clutter
there are rocks *everywhere*, millions upon millions of them...
So, contrary to popular terrestrial opinion, meteorite hunting
here on Mars isn't simply a matter of taking a stroll into the
desert and looking at your feet. They're *not* everywhere. One
Hunter told me once that looking for a single meteorite on Mars
is "like looking for a bit of hay in a stack of needles". Just
like on Earth, you have to look for them in a place where
they're more likely to be found, somewhere where they'll really
stand out against the terrain and occur in unusually high
numbers. You have places like that there - the blue-white
icefields of Antarctica, or the deserts in Africa and
Australia- and we have our equivalents: vast stretches of open
desert here in the north; the southern ice cap, though that can
be very dusty; the dust-filled interiors of the biggest
craters... they're all popular meteorite hunting grounds. I'm
sure there are half a dozen people out there right now, as I
write you this letter, looking for starstones...
Just as I was for a couple of days, up in Vasitas.
If you look at your Mars map - I'm assuming you have one to hand
now every time you read one of my mails? If you haven't it
might be an idea from now on! I have some travelling to do!
you'll find Lyot crater "way up north", just beneath the dark,
polar band (or 30 degrees east, 50 degrees north if you feel
like plotting it out precisely. The crater lies at the western
end of a long, narrow flat plain, and a remote Prospector probe
recently flew over it, looking for traces of minerals. It was
unsuccesful, but it found something much better - a new strewn
field. (A 'strewn field' is what we call an area above which a
large meteorite has broken up, scattering pieces of itself down
onto the ground below.) A survey team was despatched a couple of
days later - that's quite fast for Mars - and they came back
beaming from ear to ear, clutching bags stuffed full of
meteorites and armed with fishermen's tales of how there were
too many starstones up there to count. They asked the Base
Commander for help, and she agreed. We were drafted, and taken
up there to act as assistants to the geology team.
Hunter-Gatherers, I suppose... :-)
Your map will tell you at a glance that Lyot is so far away that
travelling there in a rover was simply out of the question, so
Commander McNeil gave permission for us to be taken north in a
shuttle. We all gathered outside the shuttle bay on the morning
of our departure excited beyond words. We'd been warned that it
was going to be very hard work, and we all realised that, but
all we could think of was one thing: two whole days - and a
night! - away from home. Freedom! There was still an hour to go
until sunrise, and we were all sleepy and gritty-eyed as we
greeted each other with bags slung over our shoulders, crammed
full of all our essentials - music CDs, players, books, junk
food, the usual! :-)
The first big surprise of the day was finding, when we walked
into the bay, that we would be travelling in an old CK-20.
They're ugly brutes, basically just a pair of pyramids linked
together by a grid-like mass of beams and struts, with a crew
cabin at the front and an engine block at the rear, and have
been on Mars for years. They're more than just shuttles,
they're essentially mobile research stations, which can fly to
any location, set down on the ground and support the work of a
small science team for several days. Those two pyramids I
mentioned, both are detachable and have specific uses: the
front one is a passenger cabin, the rear one is a
fully-equipped lab, with a cycling airlock, a couple of work
stations. Connect them with a tunnel and you have everything
needed to hold an Outback geek party! :-)
Seeing the CK-20 sitting on its pad waiting for us, surrounded
by fussing techs and members of the geology team, we all knew
were were in for an "interesting" time... :-)
Once we'd taken our seats, splitting up into our own little
social groups and cliques, the flight north seemed to pass in a
blur. I grabbed a starboard side window seat so I could enjoy
the view, and while everyone else gabbled and gossiped away
around me I pressed my face to the crysta-glass to enjoy the
dawn. Oh, it was beautiful Cal! With the Sun still some
distance below the horizon, the planet beneath us was still
purple as we rose into the air; the sprawling landscape was
painted in shades of plum and indigo, and the eastern horizon
was an undulating scarlet line which cut the world off from a
raging orange and crimson sky, marked here and there with scars
of angry red cloud. Then the sky began to brighten, cycling
though purple to scarlet... pink.. and then the Sun burst over
the horizon like a nuclear fireball, an explosion of golden
light which shattered the sky in a heartbeat, burning away the
night's last lingering clouds and banishing the stars to
oblivion in a moment. As it climbed higher the Sun's light
rippled over the planet's surface, rippling towards me over the
craters and hills and mountains, flooding over the land like a
tidal wave of molten gold... then it was past us, there was
clear sky between the Sun and the horizon again. Daybreak on
Mars. You have No Idea.. :-)
After that excitement we followed a fairly unremarkable
flightpath to Lyot, which took us over mostly flat, featureless
desert, broken here and there by a few far-scattered mesas and
valley or canyon systems, and after five hours of easy flying
we were dropping down towards our home for the following two
days - Lyot crater.
Lyot's a big crater, spanning five degrees of longtitude and as
many degrees of latitude, an almost perfectly circular scar on
Mars' rocky skin excavated by the impact of an asteroid-sized
body millennia ago, during the Great Bombardment, and as we
dropped down towards it it seemed to stare up blindly out of
the tan-coloured desert floor like a grotesque, empty eye
socket, with dark, deep shadows cast on the desert behind its
sharp-edged western rimwall. Very impressive, like your Meteor
Crater in Arizona - but enlarged by a factor of ten... ;-)
Our landing site - the imaginatively-christened 'Lyot Strewn
Field' - lay a little further north and east, so we flew over
the northern rim of the crater as we descended. It was
stunning, looking down into that deep pit at the mountains,
dust dunes and smaller craters within it, like looking at a
grab-bag of Mars' most common features, but after a few minutes
it was behind us and we were within sight of the Field itself.
The survey team had left a marker beacon at its centre, to
guide us in, and as we approached we all crowded around the
windows to get our first glimpse of the area. It didn't look
anything special, to be honest, just a long stretch of
pale-coloured desert which disappeared over the eastern
horizon, like the exposed bed of some huge, dried-up
prehistoric martian river. Our pilot told us over the intercom
that we would be landing in a couple of minutes, and asked us
to strap ourselves in in preparation. We did as we were told,
and listened to the engines whining as they were throttled
back, braking our descent. Moments later we landed, with a
considerable bump, and the pilot welcomed us to what would be
known, temporarily, as "Lyot Base". We all smiled, content in
the knowledge that by simply by being there we had pushed the
Frontier back just a little further... that kind of thing's
important to us here on Mars, especially to thos eof us born
here. That's probably hard for you to understand, but that's
okay. Maybe when you get here you'll see what I mean. :-)
Our pilot had told us during the flight that he would be leaving
us soon after landing - a message had come in from a science
team on the north polar ice cap, asking for a medical evac, and
he had been ordered to go and assist - so, following
procedures, as always (the *only* way to stay alive here) we
all pulled on our helmets and suits and made our way to the
airlock, cycling through it one by one until we were all
standing out on the surface. It felt soooooo good to be Out
again Cal, I can't begin to tell you. Just to be outside again,
on Mars, with that huge sky above me and the dust beneath my
boots, I felt more alive than I had done in days. And I could
tell the others were happy to be away from Chryse too; they were
stomping and bounding around like idiots, kicking up clouds of
cinnamon-coloured dust with their big, uncontrollable feet as
the teachers struggled to rein them in.
But the sound of a warning tone ringing in their helmets brought
the wanderers to their senses, and joined by our teachers and
the geology team we headed away from the CK, to a patch of bare
rock which was the standard safe distance of 200 metres. Then
we turned and looked back at the shuttle. It was a strangely
moving sight, beautiful in an ugly kind of way. The CK has none
of the flowing lines of its descendants, the sleeker, more
passenger-friendly CM and CN models, but it serves its purpose,
faithfully and truly, and as I looked at it sitting out there
on the sand I couldn't help thinking how perfectly at home it
looked...
Then the ground beneath our feet started to tremble and shake,
and we watched the shuttle's superstructure lift slowly up off
the desert floor, like a giant waking from a deep, deep sleep.
Then it swung around to port, until its snub nose was pointing
north, then fled, leaving us standing out on the martian sands.
Alone.
No, not quite alone. In the near distance, where there had once
been a shuttle, there now stood two small pyramids, and for a
moment I could almost imagine I was there Callum, on your
world, in the middle of the Egyptian desert thousands of yeara
ago, staring at the great pyramids of Giza. Only, there was no
Sphinx, and the pyramids before me were not built out of stone,
but metal and glass, and their surfaces were smooth and clean,
covered with mirror-like solar panels to catch the Sun's light
and convert it into electricity, to power our experiments and
equipment and keep us alive; and, being constructed so, they
reflected perfectly the surrounding landscape and sky, so that
they seemed to vanish and merge with that landscape if you
searched for them after briefly looking away... beautiful, Cal,
no pictures could ever hope to do such a sight justice...
<<sigh>>
Because we had landed a short distance away from the southern
boundary of the strewn-field (a few of the others moaned at
that, until I explained it was probably not a good idea to land
inside it, and have the pyramid modules actually cover some of
the meteorites!) our first task was to deploy the emergency
power generators from the habitation module, while the
so-called 'grown-ups' (who were by that time leaping and
bouncing about just as much as us, if not more so!) conducted an
initial recce of the site, so we bounced keenly back over to
it, leaving trails of deep footprints in the sand, and hauled
the huge solar-cell-covered sheets out of their storage bays.
When they were stretched out over the desert floor we waited
for the red lights on their edges to blink on, confirming they
were collecting sunlight. Eventually they did, releasing us to
move on to more serious matters: the first Hunt!
In our absence the geo-team had checked out the lab and its
equipment, satisfying themeslves that all inside it was
operational, and we joined up with them outside the hab-module,
like kids assembling in a schoolyard for a fire drill. After
telling us that we had landed just a few minutes' walk away
from the field boundary, they asked us all to fan out into a
line and advance into the field, slowly, like a search party,
and check for meteorites on the desert floor. The purpose of the
first Hunt was, they stressed, to get us used to the local
conditions, to "dip our toes into the water" and learn how to
recognise our prey.
Being a desert fox, as you know, I was already familiar with
meteorite ID methods: a typical meteorite is dark, because of
its 'fusion crust' of melted rock, and they weigh more than
surrounding rocks too, being denser and having some iron
content. Stones would be typically rounded and smooth, metallic
meteorites would probably be more irregular in shape, with pits
and hollows and protrusions too.
The final field test was centuries old: if the stone was
attracted to a strong magnet (like the one I'd pre-mounted on
the back of my glove, you know me, always prepared!) it was
much more likely to have come from Up There. I couldn't help
laughing. I was raring to go!
The others seemed to be feeling in a light mood too, because by
the time we were all assembled in our line everyone was either
laughing or smiling, and it felt like we were on holiday
instead of conducting serious scientific research. Even the
Geo-team joined into the spirit of things; to signal the start
of the search the team leader raised his hand theatrically,
like a Roman emperor demanding silence before the start of a
gladiator tournament... then dropped it. With a mixture of
whoops, laughs and cheers we started forwards, edging into the
strewn field cautiously, like soldiers advancing into enemy
territory.
It felt un-natural to be outside and moving so slowly - I love
to bounce when I'm outside on my own! I can bounce along for
miles and miles and miles..! :-) - and I felt like an old
woman shuffling and bumbling along, having to control myself
literally every step of the way. But soon the shouting began.
Whenever someone spotted a possible meteorite they called their
name out over the radio, and everyone else had to stop in their
tracks while a Geoteam member bobbled over to check it out.
That was annoying and frustrating at first, but I soon
realised how precious those moments of silence and stillness
were; they gave me an opportunity to drink in the view, to
savour my surroundings, and while everyone else fidgeted,
shuffling from one foot to the other, I just let out a deep
breath and Looked...
The deep martian Outback desert is special Cal, unique, as
treasured by native martians as your islanders treasure their
cliffs, beaches and oceans. Without any mountains, crater walls
or volcanoes to clutter the horizon, standing in the centre of
a vast dust desert is a breathtaking experience. To feel such
isolation, such... insignificance, is so humbling, so
centering, I smile just thinking about it, and ache to do it
again. Some people can't bear it, they have to fight off
previously-unknown agoraphobic feelings and get back to their
lander, rover or whatever as quickly as they can. Me? I could
stand there out in the open all day, gazing up at the
never-ending, peachcoloured sky, staring out to the unreachable
horizon, feeling at one with the planet beneath and around me,
part *of* it...
And the colours, Cal! I can't begin to do them justice... look
closely, and for long enough, and you see that the rocks aren't
just red, or brown, like they appear on photos, they're a
million subtle shades, and each one, each one is an individual
in its own right, with its own markings, its own profile,
shape and form... million upon million of them stretching away
to infinity, too many to ever count, too many to ever even
see...
Jenna found the first Suspect, and called out her name so loudly
at first I wondered if she'd fallen and twisted an ankle or
something, but when I looked around to see where the cry had
come from I saw her jumping up and down very excitedly,
summoning the Geo-team over to her with repeated cries of "I've
found one! I've found one!" Like me, Jenna has found meteorites
before, more than once, and although it's quite a rare event
we've all got kind of used to it by now. But I could understand
why she was so excited by her find; this time we were members of
a team, everyone was working together, it felt... different...
grander somehow. We were suddenly part of something bigger,
and important. No-one had ever been up here before, the ground
beneath our feet was New Mars, virgin territory, free of
bootprints and toe-scuffs -
But poor Jenna had called out too soon. Her meteorite turned out
to be a "meteor-wrong", just a darker-than-usual piece of
impact debris, catapulted into the area from who knows where
over the horizon. She was gutted, and tossed the rock aside
contemptuously, only smiling when the Geo-team leader patted her
on the shoulder and congratulated her on her observational
skills in spotting the rock at all. She felt better after that,
and after a brief pause the Hunt resumed.
We walked for two hours, in a line which spread out to my right
and left, scanning the ground carefully, closely, eyes roaming
over and between and around every rock, pebble and boulder
while the Sun arched above us and the shadows behind us
lengthened. Each time someone found a meteorite the Line ground
to a halt, and a Geo-team member would lope over to the finder,
image the meteorite where it lay, then bag it and mark the
location of the find with a temporary micro-beacon. Then we'd
start all over again...
This carried on until eventually it was time to head back, and
at a signal from Geo-leader our line stopped advancing and
ground to its final halt. Each of us span around on our heels
and re-traced our steps, exactly, so as not to disturb the
area. I hadn't found anything, unfortunately, but others had,
and our haul was an impressive thirteen meteorites, and a
couple of dozen false-alarms (only one of them mine, I might
add!); Jenna, happily, found one of the real ones, an
eyeball-sized, oriented beauty, with a rippled fusion crust
which was so beautiful it more than made up for her earlier
disappointment, and I swear she never stopped smiling all the
way back to the pyramids.
It was as we were just about to exit the strewn-field that I
heard a plaintive cry through my earphones, and span slowly
round to see Kai looking off somewhere to his right, distracted
by... something. No-one else had heard his call, it seemed,
because the Geo-team leader and his colleagues were already
bounding on ahead of us, eager to get the collected specimens
stored safely before nightfall, and our teachers seemed to be
in just as much of a hurry to get back too, content to leave us
to fend for ourselves. I looked at little Kai and felt his
frustration: he had obviously spotted something interesting, but
being the shy, insecure kid he is he couldn't bring himself to
make a fuss about it. There was no way he was going to call out
any louder!
Sensing something was wrong I quickly flashed him a private
message glyph, and as it popped up on the screen which coated
the inside of his helmet visor I saw him turn to face me,
puzzled by my demand to look at me. "What have you seen?" I
asked him over a private channel. He sent back a one-word
reply: "meatywrite?" which left me giggling but excited me at
the same time. "Go get!" I glyphed back, but he shook his head
emphatically, horrified by my outrageous suggestion. What? And
risk being seen and punished for disobedience? We were under
strict instructions not to wander from our pre-determined search
tracks. "Go get!" I re-glyphed, but he shook his head again,
"I'll take blame if wrong" I told him. That seemed to do the
trick; he broke away from the line and bounced over to the
left, eventually stopping in a cloud of billowing dust before
kneeling down in front of a large boulder, one of the few
decent-sized ones on the whole plain. He reached out his
shaking hands, scrambled around beneath the rock, then stood,
examined what was in his trembling hand, then turned and
bounded back towards me.
"Look!" he commanded, holding out his find. Lying in the palm of
his grubby, dust-stained gauntlet was a mottled green-black
rock, a meteorite without a doubt. I patted the top of his
shoulder top congratulate him, and was about to tell him how
well he'd done when one of our teacher chaperones appeared,
bounding over to us and clearly angry about something. Poor,
panic-stricken Kai stood rooted to the spot as the teacher
scolded him for disobeying instructions, and even when I
defended him, taking the blame, he was still condemned for
being disobedient. Taking the meteorite off him the teacher
grabbed his arm and swung him around towards the pyramids,
pulling him roughly after her. As he was dragged away Kai
looked at me accusingly, and I felt awful for getting him into
trouble, really I did, but the damage had been done. All I
could do was follow them and make sure the Geo-team leader knew
about Kai's find, and who had been to blame. I also wanted to
make sure the meteorite was handed over to the Geo-team;
something about it had struck me as odd, I couldn't put my
finger on it, but I knew I wanted to make sure Kai's discovery
was properly credited.
That first Hunt was basically just a rehearsal, a dry run if you
like, to get us used to search techniques and procedures, and
after going back inside the habitation pyramid for a much-needed
lunch we all assembled outside for a second time, eager to build
upon our initial success. Jenna seemed particularly eager to be
on the prowl again, but poor Kai was sandwiched between two
teachers, to deter him from straying off the path again. I tried
to get his attention by waving, and even sent him a tiny glyph
to ask him to talk to me, but he either didn't see it or ignored
it, and just stared at the ground as the Geo-team leader
explained that our second Hunt would be a much more serious
affair. This time we would be stretched out across a wider area,
with a bigger gap inbetween each other, and it would be up to
us, individually, to locate, record and recover meteorites along
our search track through the field.
This time, he warned sternly, sweeping his gaze along the row of
reflective visors staring back at him, we were On Our Own.
Everything we collected would be examined back in the lab, and
it was absolutely crucial that we made the most of our time by
recovering as many meteorites as possible. To motivate us,
meteor-wrongs would be tossed onto individual piles outside the
lab, forming a row of "Cairns of Shame". And he'd personally
make sure that everyone knew which cairn belonged to which
Hunter.
"Oh," I thought, looking at the sample bag I'd been given to
fill, "no pressure then..."!
Then we were on the move, cheering and shouting out
encouragement to each other as we bounced over to the boundary
for the second and final time. According to the prebriefing
we'd be entering it this time from a slightly different
direction, and our second Hunt would take us across the full
width of the field, a trek of more than two kilometres. We'd be
shuffling along for almost three hours, and each find we made
would make our bags a little heavier, our task a little harder.
I felt a little ill at the prospect of all that work being
rewarded with public humiliation as all my meteorites ended up
as a pile of discarded rocks in the evening twilight...
But all that was forgotten as we assembled on the boundary. A
moment's hesitation and reflection, accompanied by the sound of
a dozen people taking deep, calming breaths, and then the
leader's hand dropped again.
With a rousing cheer the Hunt resumed!
But it was very different the second time. On our earlier Hunt
we had been able to see the people on either side of us, and had
felt part of a group, a team; this time the line was so
fragmented, its members so scattered that each of us would feel
like we were on our own out in the desert. As I loped along in
slow motion I felt like I had been banished from Chryse and left
out in the Outback to fend for myself. All I could see were
rocks, the desert plain stretching away on all sides, vague
hints of rolling hills on the southern horizon, all beneath a
vast, breathtakingly-clear sky the colour of honey. I turned
slowly to face the pyramids, and gasped when I saw how small
they were, reduced in size by the distance between me and them
and by the immensity of sky crushing them into the desert.
I couldn't help it, the urge was too strong; I turned slowly on
the spot, arms outstretched, savouring the moment, delighting in
my isolation... in that time-frozen moment I was a pharoah,
surveying his lands, alone with his desert -
Then I stubbed my boot on a rock and came back to Mars with a
bump, literally; only my instinctively-outstretched hands
prevented me from cracking my visor open like an eggshell as I
spiralled down to the ground. Dusting myself off I vowed to
concentrate on the task at hand, and, scrambling to my feet glad
that there was no-one nearby to witness my clumsiness started to
search.
I found my first meteorite just a few minutes later. It was only
small, about the size of the knuckle in my thumb, an
unremarkable piece of dark stone, but it was *mine* Cal, *I'd*
found it. Smiling I followed the Procedures: I photographed it
where it lay, from several angles, then picked it up and, after
wrapping it in protective, pre-labelled sheeting, dropped it
gently into my collecting bag, making sure to stick a
mini-beacon into the ground at the exact point where I had found
it before moving on. I found another ten minutes later, a larger
one this time, and soon after that my third meteorite was
resting in the bag, snuggling up to the others. I felt ten feet
tall, and forgot all about the Cairns of Shame; I was sure my
finds were genuine starstones, absolutely convinced..!
At the end of my first hour of Hunting I had collected over a
dozen meteorites - or rather, suspected meteorites - and was
feeling like I owned the whole desert, as if the starstones had
fallen from the sky just for me. But the more I found, the more
I puzzled over little Kai's earlier find. None of mine looked
like it. Mine were all darker, looked roughly the same (which
made sense if they had a common origin, I know) but Kai's had
looked different, it had had that strange green tinge to its
blackness... A guilty jolt shot through me. What if Kai's find
wasn't a meteorite at all? What if was just a discoloured rock?
I'd got him into trouble for nothing -
I heard a triumphant cry over my earphones, and recognised it as
having come from Jenna. Obviously she'd found another. Telling
myself Kai's mysterious rock wasn't my problem - and determined
to collect more meteorites than Jenna! - I moved further into
the strewn field, continuing my Hunt...
Time passed, silently but for the rasping echoes of my own
laboured breathing every time I bent down to examine a
suspicious rock...
- without warning a single, pure tone sounded over the radio. I
couldn't believe it! That was the recall signal from the
Geo-team leader, telling us we had reached the end of our three
hour Hunt. Three hours? I had been so busy, so focussed on
searching that I had totally lost track of time, but now I could
see that the Sun had crossed the sky and was dropping towards
the horizon, out of a darkening sky.
Then the fatigue hit me. With a vengeance. Moaning as I
straightened up out of my stoop, grimacing as the bones of my
spine snapped back into place with an audible popping sound, I
stood still and took a deep, deep breath, filling my burning
lungs with recycled air. Behind me, I knew, was a bread-crumb
trail of discarded stones, rejected for being too light, or the
wrong colour, or for not responding to the gentle kiss of the
magnet mounted on my gauntlet. But my bag was weighed down with
several dozen specimens, and I was convinced to my very bone
marrow that each and every one of them was a genuine, fallen
starstone.
I was exhausted, and the bag felt like it weighed well over a
ton, and I knew that I was at least an hour's trudging walk away
from lying down back in the hab-module at the pyramids. But my
blood was singing Cal! I can't remember the last time I was so
happy. (Which in itself is probably a little sad, but there you
go... :-) )
With the Sun dropping slowly towards the far west horizon I
turned my back on the strewn-field and headed home.
I walked for what seemed like a lifetime, occasionally spotting
one of the rocks I'd discarded earlier. Twice I spotted a
suspect I'd overlooked the first time, and dropped it into the
bag - adding to its already almost-crippling weight - before
lurching on my way once more. Eventually, mercifully, the
pyramids loomed up ahead of me. The sky was the colour of
caramel, the ground streaked with long, jagged shadows. My white
suit was glowing bright orange in the light of the setting Sun,
looking as if it could burst into flames at any moment, and
every bone, every cell in my body ached...
But I didn't care. Because right then, looking around me I
caught my first sight of the others, converging on me from all
sides, each one weighed down with their own sample bags, and
seeing them stumbling toward me I felt the weariness lift from
my shoulders, replaced by a sense of elation which human beings
have felt for centuries, for thousands of years at the end of
such a long, long day. Without prompting, we all broke into
song, celebrating our success.
The Hunters were coming home.
Two hours later, after handing in my rock-packed bag to the
Geo-team in the lab pyramid, I fell onto my bunk bed and felt
like I could sleep for a thousand years. No such luck. Barely an
hour later I was woken by someone shaking my shoulder, and
opened my grit-filled eyes to see Jenna standing over me,
excitement written all over her face. She told me that everyone
had been summoned into the lab for a briefing. My heart sank.
Surely they weren't sending us out into the strewn-field while
it was dark? No, she reassured me as she left me to get dressed,
no-one was pulling on suits, we were just to meet in the
laboratory and she'd see me there. I pulled on my jumpsuit and
made my way to the lab.
I was one of the last to get there, and found everyone packed
into the lab shoulder to shoulder. Everyone, that is, except
Kai, who was out in front, sandwiched between the two most
senior members of the Geoteam and facing the crowd with a look
of pure fear in his eyes. He looked like he was facing a firing
squad. And it was my fault.
I started to push my way through the group to stand by Kai, but
Jenna pulled me back, shaking her head. Something in her eyes
told me not to argue, so I hung back, reluctantly, and waited to
see what was going to happen. A minute later, when the room was
echoing to deafening cheers and applause, I finally reached Kai,
and he hugged me so hard I thought I might pop, but it was worth
it to see the huge smile on his face.
Who could have guessed that Kai's little rock would have turned
out to be a terrestrial meteorite, only the third piece of Earth
ever found on Mars? :-))
Anyway, Kai's discovery cut the expedition short. We all wanted
to stay and Hunt some more, having acquired a taste for it, but
the terrerstrial meteorite was needed back at the main Chryse
lab, urgently, so instead of embarking on a third Hunt we packed
up all our gear and waited for the CK to come back for us. It
dropped out of the pink morning sky like a bird of prey, and
settled over the twin pyramids so gently we hardly felt its
embrace. As we rose into the clear morning sky again I stared
out the window, down at the remains of Lyot Base. There wasn't
much to see, just two squares of flattened desert floor, forty
metres across, a dozen trails of footprints meandering away to
the north...
And lined up beside the flattened squares were a dozen small
rock piles. Mine was the second from the right. It wasn't the
smallest, but it wasn't the biggest either. That was good enough
for me. Echoing with the sounds of one last cheer the CK
pirouetted round on its manouvering thrusters and headed for
Chryse. The Hunt was over.
So, that's why I wasn't able to write to you recently. I was...
rather busy. :-) I hope you can write to me again soon, and let
me know what happened after you left the site of that Viking
burial boat, I want to know why you were going to the south of
the island..!
Write me soon!
Jen x
P.S. Just as I was getting ready to send this I heard that Kai's
meteorite has been analysed by the Chryse experts, and it's
definitely from Earth, and it's the oldest of the three. There's
a wild rumour going around on MarsNet that it's a piece of
debris from the asteroid impact which killed the dinosaurs, 65
million years ago. Ridiculous!
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