NOVEL NEXT Chapter 120: Mars Walk
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Adya: What's the point of coming all the way out here to think of ourselves as Indian or American? We're Martians, now.
Vincent: Watching the girls grow up—well, they're Martians. I'm not always sure how much we have in common.
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Sol 506 FY 26, 07:12 Mars Time, Bonestell Crater Colony, Crater Surface
Stiffened joints popped with unfamiliar strain with every step of her Mars walk. Despite the beauty and the danger of the surface, these walks were generally limited to Bonestell Colony business, or perhaps important affairs of the heart, as she had done earlier in the month. Today, though, what had once been a mildly irritating chore—swapping out the batteries for some of the tractor sheds—was proving to be a back-breaking trial by fire.
Every step felt wrong—resisted, clumsy, six times harder than it should've been. Because it was. The Scaffold was doing its job.
Battery swaps in the tractor sheds were the kind of chore they usually assigned to teenagers. Not because it was light work—because it was simple. Predictable. Hard to screw up. She remembered showing Jillian how to do it: gloves off for the final contact check, never touch the casing directly or you'll get burned, and absolutely do not shake the box once you've set it in place. It needed to settle. The battery's layers were everything. Like most engineers, Marie considered, there was a right way and a wrong way to do these little tasks. And the wrong way for a tilt-box was to tilt it at all when you installed it. If you did, you undid the benefit of those hours of sitting in your rover, settling. You were delaying the device's function.
Maybe that was why she'd never be made administrator.
Jillian had always complained about having to stiff-armed transfer the tilt-box to avoid disturbing the layers, bemoaning the necessity as the newly-adult Marie had shown her the ropes. Marie was willing to bet that particular reaction had been faithfully passed down by her malicious apprentice to any teens unfortunate enough to get her for a senior.
But today Marie was going to shake it. No question. No way around it.
She hadn't done her normal job since she got the Scaffold. Just a few days—but it was already impossible. Piezo-electric fibers resisted every voluntary movement—curling, lifting, squatting, twisting—turning them into 2.2 Earth gravities of resistance. Passive load it ignored. Active effort it punished.
The theory was simple: build up her spine and support muscles to survive Earth gravity without collapsing. Earth, or worse—transit. Nobody trusted Martian spines to hold up under real reentry loads, not after a life in one-third G. So if she wanted to go, she had to earn it. Every day. Every step. Every breath.
So she'd volunteered for grunt work.
The box had a minimum size at which it would be useful. A size that, on Earth, would have completely precluded the use of tilt-boxes. Incredibly dense. But on Mars, you could lift the 80-pound boxes, if not gladly.
Except Marie had chosen to put on the Scaffold today, just like every other day for the last several. Chosen to go out and do her job, even as it slowly wore her down to nothing. And today was her time: change out the batteries on a tractor shed. It's 80 pounds of Martian weight; however, the Scaffold corrected to 2.2 Gs. That's Earth gravity, about six times what she felt normally. Of course, the Scaffold only prevented active movements; passive movements were allowed. So once she used the crane to pick up the tilt-box—which felt just really stupid—and got it on the cart, a cart capable of carrying 80 Martian pounds, her legs begged for relief like she was pulling a cart weighing hundreds of pounds. But the good thing about carts is that a cart weighing hundreds of pounds is still perfectly doable.
It rolled. Carts always rolled.
They worked off a three-component thermal system: two molten metals and one salt, all kept at eight hundred degrees. The reaction formed covalent bonds and bled out heat as it went. That was the discharge: heat, and a growing web of irreversible structure. You wanted to recharge it? Good luck. You'd need external heat to denature every bond you'd just built. If it froze? It died. Solid metal. Dead salt. No current.
Recharge was a cinch, though. Put it next to the fusion core.
Don't want to go to the fusion core yourself? Smarty pants you. Okay, so instead we'll dump the box out. Tilt boxes hooked in to a hinge, and . . . tilted their contents out like a pail being dumped in a medieval street. Good riddance.
Oh, you want to refill? Well that's harder, because you need all three material, in ratio, in the box you just emptied, from the big tank they're all boiling in.
In principle, you could stir them all up constantly, and take a sample of the mixture, and let it stand, but then engineers would have to replace the stirrer. No, thank you.
So, thin the tank until it's just tilt-box height, over where you refill, at the salt-line -- that's the middle layer. Pour some in. Now, it's possible you got too much of one of them. Don't want that. So leave the connection open, and tilt the box back and forth, and mix it up yourself. Tilt-box.
She had a love-hate relationship with the things.
It only worked on Mars because Mars had so little air. In space, there was no great heat sink the size of a planet trying to kill your batteries, and they worked fine. On Mars, you insulated the stand. You shielded it from the frozen regolith with the best of insulations--the near-vacuum. You insulated the hell out of the tilt box container, which became even heavier. And you did not shake it once it had settled, because engineers get set in their ways and this was the best practice, as Marie adjudged it. Don't shake it when you seat it.
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Marie was going to have to shake it, though.
Jillian would've complained. She always did, back when she showed her how to do this the right way. Slow-walk it, let the sediment sit, don't disturb the active layers. Marie had been a new adult then. Barely twenty. A little proud, a little tired. Now she was older, and worse off. Her hands trembled inside the gloves. Her breath fogged the visor, then cleared. Of course, Jillian had been like 12, so her complaints were forgivable.
Jillian would laugh if she could see Marie now.
She was going to accidentally shake the tilt-box, and there was nothing she could do about it.
The Scaffold chirped. Fifteen minutes of activity earned her thirty minutes of exhaustion. That's what it told her.
But it wasn't simulating gravity. Not really. It was simulating doing things under 2.2 G. Curling. Pulling. Lifting. She could hold her hand still, and the suit didn't care at all. Hold her arm out in front of her until the weak gravity of Mars made it an actual challenge? The suit did not care. She'd get no reps for that. And yet—and this, of course, meant that the suit was still perfectly capable of making any active mistake you did six times harder. If there was ever someone who was likely to minimize that fact, it was not Marie. But being six times harder to straighten your back is bad. Walking was mostly doable. She supposed her muscles had been built for that.
And what she was doing was pulling an eighty-pound box, on a cart, through Martian sand, toward a shed with a tractor in it nobody needed to use right now.
No one was watching. No one cared.
But she was going to finish.
Jillian hadn't seen her in the suit yet. It had only been a few days. But Jaz? Jaz was already less than jazzed about what Marie was willing to put herself through—for Gordon.
And Marie wasn't sure she was wrong to feel that way.
Why hadn't she just accepted her fate? Lived a solitary life. Dated a decade down. Waited until some of the Mars boys finally got old enough to be mature-ish. Thirty-five dating twenty-six—that wasn't so bad, was it?
Fate had been a decent enough plan.
But no. She had to go and find him. The perfect guy for her. Not the perfect guy. She wasn't under any illusions about that. For example, he didn't trust anyone—not even himself. If you let him talk to you about something that mattered, he would. And you'd want him to, because he liked talking and you liked listening. But you'd find him circling back, revising, questioning the thing he just said and trying to find ways to test it. It was a lot of effort, being Gordon for a day.
He didn't trust the first draft of anything.
But he was grounded. He was accurate. Whatever his intention was, he would iterate until he approached it. There was something comforting about that.
Getting him to try to do the correct thing, now that was the trick.
Nope, not thinking about him right now. No crying.
Vera had always been patient with Lark. In Marie's mind, the man was a saint in some ways. An excellent person—but with no decorum whatsoever when it came to chain of command. He'd do things without asking, not because he was stubborn, but because it literally didn't occur to him that permission might be required.
Marie used to think he was rebellious. But he wasn't. He was just straightforward. If something needed doing and he couldn't think of a reason not to do it, he did it. If you asked him later why he didn't ask first? You could believe him when he said he hadn't thought of it. That was just how his brain worked.
And yeah—sometimes the reasons were stupid reasons. Sometimes they were territorial reasons. Like: "We only made ten high-tensile rods of that size this month. We put ten in the bin. There's only one left. I need it." And then Janelle, the stockyard manager, had already called dibs on the last unit of everything in the section, because seniority. And told everybody that, proudly, at the meeting.
So he'd do the job he on the docket. And get in trouble. Because he hadn't known there was a meeting. Or he'd skipped it. Or forgot.
Vera thought that there were a lot of different ways to think about any one problem, and that most of them are good for every task, but that sometimes it was better to have variety available. And Marie had considered this at length. When she had been younger, she had been hotheaded, easily triggered. She'd cry at the snap of a toe. She would scream if someone called her stupid. And Vera had taken her under her wing and explained to this little lost girl, who badly needed socialization from someone other than her pack of rabid seven-year-olds, "Marie, you can't do that." Had shown her a better way. And part of that was thinking before you acted, thinking before you reacted. And the worst part? Now that she knew the better way, Marie had to listen to Vera say that sometimes the people who are like you were, before you put all that effort into change, can be more cognitively equipped than you will be in a situation. That sucked almost as much as the stupid suit.
Her reasoning was that Lark naturally didn't need an authority figure to feel safe doing something that needed doing, and that was valuable in situations where the authority figures were scarce on the ground. Like Mars. So--they were lucky to have him even if he did give Jenelle the screaming meanies every Friday.
Marie was getting mad. She didn't usually get mad. It was the suit. You either got mad or you cried. And she was on a Mars walk, so you would think she'd have her privacy, but she was also on a Mars walk by the equipment shed where there were cameras, so she didn't have any privacy. So she didn't want to cry.
Vera thought that there was a possibility that all these different, strange ways of thinking that were not hers, and could not be hers again, might be best in some situations. Otherwise, she had posited, why wouldn't we weed them out? We select for a lot of things—social, political, physical, intellectual—it's a little arrogant to assume something has no value just because you can't picture what it is at the moment.
But for the life of her, Marie could not understand how that kind of territorial nonsense could ever be anything but a disadvantage. Maybe she'd taken one cosmic ray too many, hit the wrong neuron, and now she's reverting to toddler games: keep-away and dog-in-the-manger.
Vera was too patient with everyone, actually. Especially Marie.
Or maybe Marie was just miserable. She kept stepping, the cart dragging behind her. As long as she didn't flex at all, the work was entirely in her legs. If she could maintain a stiff core. . . the suit didn't make maintaining the core harder, because there was no change in shape. Nifty torture machine, Marie could see why it failed the ethical standards for adoption. In enlisted men, 70% of volunteers dropped out.
She stopped walking, a happy thought having struck her. "I'm in the upper 30% for willpower. Kind of cool."
She'd never really cared about stats in games. She put her stats where the internet told her to and then played the game. That's where the fun was. Gordon could chat up witches in the wilds with nothing but his real-world social moxie; no need putting points in it. But for all that, she'd always liked the idea of gamifying her real-world stats, knowing where she shook out versus other people.
That was kind of cool.