Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Twenty-Six: Alma Mater

It didn’t take too long to catch up with the extra pylons. We had done one hundred and twenty kilometers with the original materials we had left over from the Borealis project. We had produced an overage at the end of the project because I had thought we might build another spur line. That deposit didn’t pan out, and we didn’t bother. It didn’t take much extra effort. By that time we were spinning along even at the small scale we were producing. So I had just kept them figuring we would be building such a line somewhere else because they worked so well. They did and we did.

We needed to set an additional six thousand four hundred pylons for the extra eighty kilometers to fill out two hundred properly built kilometers of the line. That sounds like a lot, but it is for both directions. We had, by that time, six groups of constructors running, and we could leapfrog one another. We found we could use stout cables to anchor the ships as long as we didn’t try anything fancy and crawled forward at construction speed. Linh crafted a flotation program that gave just enough power to the evac motors to keep the load afloat. There was no wind to blow the ships off course. We developed a very capable tracked rover that would, slowly, negotiate the passages in the canyon. It pulled that cable to set it out beyond the bounds of the pylons so that we could work at more than one location at a time. Otherwise, it would be serial, and we could only use two ships. Our progress would have been much slower.

As with everything, you get a system eventually. It took me six months and nine hundred kilometers to get to that point. Then, I was looking for something else to do, and I had nothing immediate. I am not a woman for inaction. My mother was the same. If she didn’t have something to do, she would do it over. I never saw her idle. Her eyes were always moving. Bee was kind enough to point out to me that I had worked myself into a state of redundancy. I had hired competent people for everything I had to do, and I had trained them to do it.

“Boss, can’t you replace something else to do? We don’t need you for a constructor. You don’t run them enough anymore to be really good at it anyway. If we need you for something critical, we’ll call. You can do something else. Everything is going smooth. You’re just making them nervous.”

Nice work Monica. You’ve made it, I told myself. But I didn’t believe it. There was something else I wanted to do before I took on construction of Burroughs if I ever made it that far. It was the planet. I had long wanted to do a detailed mining survey and prepare for the future. All I had done then was some digging at the base of our own mountain near Borealis to get the closest available minerals for my mine. I hadn’t gone much farther because I didn’t have the time.

So I went in search of another job to the only person who could give me one – Klara.

“Funny you should mention that Mo. You remember how we heard the theoretical scientists had been cut loose on Earth, and how the best were suddenly available and enthusiastic about going off planet to get back into their line of work? Well, the LEO colonies have gotten their universities going big time. They have that school of astronomy on the Moon run by Dr. Musa. They’ve started up some of the telescopes again. They want us to start a geology school and an exobiology school here. We have the fem for the exobiology, Morgana Kinden. Frankly, I wish we still had Devorah Hirschman. She was an academic as well as a working horticulturalist. Khloe took a good one when she killed her. I’m sad every time I think of her. But you must use who you have. She left a lot behind, though. All the exotic stuff we ship that makes life a little more tolerable for a lot of people. That’s her.”

Her body position shifted a bit, and I knew the next subject excited her optimistic side. She was Swedish after all, and she had some residual darkness in her. She was shifting gears. She leaned forward just a bit, and she must have cocked her knees, because her body started vibrating, just a bit, on the right side. I do the same thing myself, so I am attuned to it. You don’t even realize what you are doing most of the time, and you can’t stop unless you extend your foot a bit forward to relieve the tension. I wasn’t going to interrupt her for that. She would become aware of it eventually on her own. I always do.

“I’ve felt for a long time that we must venture out of our hole here. We’re starting that, but there’s much more to do. This new space university fits in with it, and with you. What about you run the Mining School of the University of Mars? I’ve got feelers out for geologists. There are plenty of them on Earth and a few of them on the Moon. This planet is a natural for that. You should ask Boris about his friend on the Moon, Manjit Gupta. I want us to be doing the same kind of work they do. We’re going to be here a long while, and we are going to need all kinds of resources. This planet certainly has them, but we don’t know where they are, or how to process them most efficiently. I’m also going to second you to the exobiology department of a new school we have for that. You are going to be doing all that looking anyway, and you could do something else at the same time. I don’t want you to be bored. I want you to look for signs of life. The biologists can teach you how.

“I thought we could build you a little buggy like the one you are using for your line. We could equip it with all the stuff you would need and give you one of those scout copters to replace likely sites. We also have a lot of satellite pictures and I figured to use a few of our CubeSats so we could get more. What do you think?”

“I love it, but what about combining it with what I am doing already? I could lay off a bit on the line but still be helpful. We could re-equip our cable towing rover with prospecting instruments. The Valles shows excellent prospects for water-altered minerals. The kind we are so used to on Earth. It’s also a very good place to search for signs of life. Eventually, we will want to go planet-wide, but, with this line we are building, as you optimistically put it, we are going to spend a long time around here. It’s a good place to look. And convenient transport is a plus as well. The more things we can use the line for, the easier we can cover its costs. There’s going to be a river again here, this time of air, and people are going to want to be here. Such a thing will naturally encourage a string of cities. This is certainly the best place for me to spend my time, Klara.”

“I’m not going to argue with you when you’re saving me money. We’re going to have a Professor around here again. This time a little less annoying. That’s you in case you thought I was talking about someone else. We’ll need another facility up top for your university. We’ve been upgrading the elevator all along, so we’ve got good access. Maybe people will come here to go to school one day.

“I don’t want to overload you, Klara, but I’m wondering whether we could have another school. Computer engineering. Linh is really overqualified for her day job, and I don’t want her feeling frustrated not being in on all the academic action. She’s had a lot more of that than we have. It would be a good excuse to get a few more mathematicians up here. They are valuable and versatile people. That wouldn’t take too much money since a lot of their work is theoretical. Then we’d really have a university. Can we get someone famous enough to be Chancellor?”

It didn’t turn out to be so easy. The simultaneous requests from the Moon, LEO, and Mars tripped a switch somewhere down on Earth. They might not want those people all so much just then, but that didn’t mean they were eager for us to have them either. We didn’t figure that in advance. It appeared senseless to us. Why be vindictive? Those people had to eat. I can tell you it angered us. What point in trying to accommodate us with the airline and then oppose us on research? What benefit would it be to them? Sometimes I don’t know about people at all. The Cthaw might be right about us. We are hopeless, and the best policy is to avoid us.

It was Bee who suggested a fix for that. He had just been through it with his family. What you couldn’t do one way, you could do the other.

“You will never go wrong appealing to people’s greed, Mo. Works almost every time. Get these people to take advantage of the UN marketing campaign for LEO. Just move them up there. They subsidize the move. We will just need to cover their costs to get here. That will be very expensive, but we would probably need to pay those costs in any event. Starward isn’t going to pay for us forever. The marketing people won’t suspect a thing, and even if they do, they won’t care. It’s not their department, as they used to say.

“In order to make it convincing, you’ll need to arrange to buy a house there. They can do that themselves. They’ll probably make money on that. Then I can get my friend Josh to sell it for you. He will be delighted. He and his sister-in-law Miriam are in the real estate business along with my daughter. If we contribute the money, we can sell and use it to pay some of the transport costs. If we’re doing this often, maybe we can keep a house or two there for our transients. It’ll save money in the long run.”

“You figure on another career as a scholar’s realtor Bee? You take on any more careers and we’re going to need to certify you as an official dabbler. How many is it so far, ten?”

“Close. Now you’re blaming me for my short attention span. I promise not to get into the real estate business, or any other business you don’t appoint me to, Sis. And look who’s talking. Mining engineer, airline developer, university professor, exobiologist, police officer etc. And then there’s all I’ve heard of your new projects. You are no-one to criticize me about being scattered.”

Our immigration scheme worked very well, but we had a little trouble moving them on from Elysium. It is so beautiful there, and it is all one gee. We won out in the end, though. We have the new world here. You can’t replace that for a scientist. We got all the people we wanted. Some came from unexpected sources. Our geology professor came from the Moon. Bee knew the man.

“Mo, I’ve got your geology prof. I texted Dr. Gupta on the Moon, as you suggested, to ask if he had some recommendations for our department on Mars. You recall I had worked with him on my first murder case. He texted back that the person he preferred was himself. He said he was getting tired of the Moon and wanted to see a world with some daylight. I didn’t tell him how wan and pale it is here. Most people, even educated ones, assume the Sun is the Sun and it looks the same no matter where you are. I didn’t go out of my way to correct him. He had another reason, though. He wants to see some geological activity. He likes our shield volcanoes. There’s a lot to learn here. So, we’ve got a Nobel Prize winner. That’s in addition to our resident geologist, Xander Tropus. They’re friendly rivals. They will love it.That should spruce up our faculty list a bit. He’s a good guy too. Very old school, and I mean the way old school should be. No ego stuff. He’s good to work with. You will like him.”

“What about my exobiology? I can’t come up with all the ideas, you know.”

He certainly doesn’t sit idle either.

“I’ve been asking Gupta. He works with quite a few of those people on the Moon. Since there are so many easily identifiable meteorite strikes there, he has had a lot of inquiries from such people. There is a prevailing idea that the easiest access to signs of life is from them. You remember that Cyra girl whose death I was investigating? She was involved in such a project under Gupta’s sponsorship. They were convinced that they could replace traces of the dinosaur extinction in fragments that might have been blown out to the Moon. Gupta told me he would try to track down some of those people. I’m sure one of them would be a good choice for our faculty.

“I’ve been doing research into the last time this was done. You wouldn’t believe it, but it was early in the last century when they started sending Rovers to Mars. I checked out how they were equipped. They had the disadvantage of having to operate them remotely. That had posed problems we won’t have. They gave a lot of thought to equipping them because it was so expensive to send them to Mars. But the selection of equipment is still important to us. They were focused in on signature compounds that were part of the life cycle of life on Earth. At first, they didn’t know of the sterilizing effect of solar radiation and cosmic rays. They didn’t know what constant irradiation does to the regolith either.

“Now we know that we need to go down to at least seven and a half metres to get away from the radiation. Because of that, it is overwhelmingly likely that any surviving life on Mars will use chemosynthesis to make food without sunlight. On Earth, one of the indicators of bacterial life is methane. It is not impossible that, if there is life here, it may produce similar byproducts, There are seasonal and daily fluctuations of methane on Mars no one has ever explained. We have never discovered the source, either. We haven’t had an opportunity. Before we got here, on a whole planet, it would have just been crazy luck to replace it. When we search this time, we can investigate We will not be confined to observation.”

“And I’m going to be the investigator.”

“Yes, Mo. It’s going to be much better if you have some data for them to work on when our experts get here. You said it yourself. You’re going to be out there. Based on what the Americans sent out in the last century, I suggest cameras, spectrometers of every type we can get, laser analyzers to facilitate that, and sniffers able to sniff things like methane, formaldehyde, and other organic chemicals. You should have the capability in your monitor to visualize the extended frequencies the camera will pick up. You can see methane with one. You should also be equipped to collect samples and carry them. You won’t need any of the analytical equipment they had on the Rovers. You’re going to be able to bring it back.

“You will need drills, with both solid drill and core sampling bits. The core sampling bits should be able to go down eight meters, at least, so you will need extension bits, and have training in the protocol to do that handily. You will need the usual manipulator arm, maybe two. At least one of the arms should have extension capabilities so you can reach. It’s safer to sit while you work. You may not be able to get everywhere. You will need stabilizing feet on the rover to facilitate that.

“Since you still have cable dragging responsibilities, you will also need a pile driver, and a hook on your manipulator for the cable end. That second arm should be heavy duty for the cable. That’s it.”

“And this was casual research in your spare time since yesterday, huh? I’m going to make sure I never have you as a student, Bee. I’ll never get a word out. Thank you. I agree with all your suggestions. Arrange with Lou to have them installed on a suitable rover. You may need one of the behemoths we used when we were getting started at Borealis.”

Bee was in his serious mode. You couldn’t get a joke past him when he was like that.

“I’m not sure we will ever discover life here, but it is worth another try. Realistically, I don’t think we would do it if you weren’t out there for a good reason already. We’ve been bumping around this planet for nearly a century, and we haven’t found anything. We haven’t even discovered where the spring methane blooms come from. Yet the Valles is probably one of the best places and we haven’t done much exploring here. With the likelihood of liquid water over a long period, and five kilometers closer to the core, it’s said to be a reasonable bet. If you discover something, it’ll be more than ground-breaking science. It will be a phenomenon. You’ll be a hero!

I couldn’t let him be the only one to state the obvious.

“Any organisms could be very valuable to us here. Extremophiles that could live here would be inured to the conditions of this planet. They would be extremely useful for research. It could set up our university as a leading institution. Alien life forms might have interesting clinical properties important to chemistry and medicine.

“So, you are going to make me one of the immortals. Not only a new Imhotep but also a new Hippocrates. Who is going to be able to live with me? Certainly not I, brother.”

He ignored me. He was on a roll.

“Now that you mention doctors, what about roping Dini in as a consultant? She might be handy for signs of life. She would know what tests to do if you found something. And what about a little hangar for the copter on the rover so we don’t need to send it home every day? It wouldn’t matter if the rotor stuck out. No wind to damage it.”

“Very good. I really like your first idea. At least I would get to see her more if we took her on. That fem is the busiest person I have ever seen. She’s running dozens of studies. You would think a partner would have some time for me. Of course, I have nothing to boast about for accessibility myself. And you are going to make it worse. You know how obsessive I can be, don’t you? There’s a lot of land out there. Four thousand kilometers by a hundred and fifty, that’s a big bite of a million square kilometers.”

“You will have the best chance anyone’s ever had. Lots of close and remote survey support to direct you to the most promising areas. Good equipment and enough time. This project is going to take us years. I’m excited for you, Sis. I wish I could join you.”

“Oh. You will, Bro. I’m not going to do all the scut work. It’s not like I need to come back in to get you. Work’s what I have you for.”

They made that Rover up for me. It turned out to be very heavy. On some of the Martian turf, that might be a problem, but down here, the soil is well consolidated, so the tracks didn’t sink in, and you could make good progress. The tracks let it float a bit too, so even where you hit sandy sections, you didn’t sink in much.

I was cable hauling for about six months. We were making very good progress on the two lines. Drawing the cable out with the rover let us use six groups to install the rails. That meant almost a hundred kilometers a day, which was an amazing speed. Impressive until you remembered we have over four thousand kilometers to cover in two directions. It will take years no matter how fast we can go.

I got to look forward to getting into that cabin every morning. After breakfast, I would go upstairs and get into the old-fashioned enclosure that machine had. When we first started making them we used the old paradigm of a flight simulator to facilitate precise control. I still liked that and preferred that to connecting controllers to a displayscreen. It gave you atmosphere and isolated you so you could concentrate. But what I really loved was the ease of imagining I was out there. Chantelle was right. You were cut off from your immediate surroundings and you could picture it. You could hear the wind of Mars in your ears and see the soil of Mars right in front of your eyes. Your seat jounced in syncopation to the bumps under your tracks. It was my favorite place to be.

And I could talk to everyone over the intercom. They aren’t listening to me much of the time, of course. They had their own work to do. They needed to stay in closer coordination to their fellows than to their outlier colleague. But they still needed me to extend the cable so they could move the ships forward to construct out front of the tracks. That’s what gave us our boost. Before that, we could only build sequentially a few meters in front of the existing tracks because the airships needed to be tethered close by. Nothing was going to blow them away, but they could still drift a bit, just with the unloading, and that was not good if you had heavy equipment going in and out.

One morning I was driving around that dry riverbed, avoiding the few sizeable boulders that ancient currents had carried along, dropping them here and there. The ochre dust spread in front of me as far as I could see. The near cliff was several hundred meters away to my left, and toward the right, the view swept away to a dusty wall on the right that was well short of the other canyon wall. The constant wind that swept down the Valles was moderate that morning, and I could see quite far wherever I looked. I didn’t need to pull cable until later in the afternoon, so I put on the search grid and located the last range where I had been searching for mineral signs. I have found a lot of resources so far. It was well worth the search even though we have found zero signs of life.

Bee’s voice came up:

“Lou says one of the flyeyes showed IR signs of methane and he directed one of the CubeSats to take a picture. You have signs of methane along the track route about two kilometers in front of you. Quite a dense cloud from the look of it. I’ve pegged it for you. Nothing much like it in the vicinity. This may be a source, Mo. Good place to dig. Good luck.”

In front of me, it was looking pretty good to make some time. There were the usual collections of rocks in front of me, and several turbulence ridges that extended kilometers ahead. Off to the right were a number of large boulders. Directly in front of me was a vee-shaped channel that ran flat and true. I rolled over the slight ridge of the channel’s opening and sped up to four klicks. I had to slow down a few times, but I was there in fifteen minutes.

When I got there, I reported, as much for my record as for my colleagues.”

“I’m at the site now. Can you pinpoint the source on my overlay? I am boosting the IR resolution of my cam and translating the data into visual. The wind speed is very low today, and there is not much dust. If you can guide me, I will get close so I can get an image.”

Lou was on the line.

“OK, I’ve done that Mo. It shows about fifty meters in front of you a bit off to the left. If you go on fifty and edge a little bit to the left, you will be right over it.”

“I’m there. I see it now. You’ve marked it in red, and it’s a vee shape headed right down the canyon. Looks pretty thick, but you’ve got the readings. I’m going to lower the drill right here. I will mark it with a flag when it’s done.

“The drill is starting to go down now, and it seems to be cutting smoothly. Better than most of the holes I have sunk so far. Now I am hitting some resistance at a meter or so and I’m backing off. I’ll try again. Most of these rocks are igneous sunk in a sedimentary matrix. When I hit them with a core drill, it goes off center, tough to handle. If you’re patient, the diamond will go through it.Too bad we can’t use lasers, but I don’t think that would be a happy mix with methane, even without the oxygen. I’m through it now and into regolith again. Down two meters, and I need to add a bit.

“Another bit, and it’s going smoothly again. It seems softer now and I am making better progress.

“Another bit and going down to four. There doesn’t seem to be any more methane, according to the sniffers. If I were going to the source of something, you would think the concentration would be rising, but it isn’t. I can’t see the rock, of course, but we will see the cores soon, assuming someone knows what to look for. I certainly don’t. I am now down to six, and I’m adding another drill section. I may as well go down to eight. I still don’t see any more evidence of higher concentrations. You’d think you would get that if you were getting closer. The surface rock wasn’t distinguished in any way. Same ochre color as everything else. I’m going to pack it up now and put in a sensor cap on the hole. Maybe that will tell us something.

“I really thought I would see some source.I’m a bit disappointed. My first plume and it doesn’t seem to be anything remarkable.”

Bee’s voice again:

“You won’t know what you’ve found until they do a lot of hard work on it. You’ve started the process. Maybe the Nobels will come later.”

I backed away from the hole. The bore bits containing their cores were packed under a shield for transport back. This time I would go back right away to secure the haul. If they were sensitive to radiation, it would not do to expose them. The methane was still coming up, so something was happening. I suppose I was hoping for little wiggly things that looked like life. Obviously not that here. But we may still replace signs of former life. Perhaps the methane was stored by living things long ago and was just slowly oozing out.

Along the way back, I coddled the haul in my truck bed. It was shielded a bit, but I didn’t want to allow it to be degraded by too much exposure. I stopped a moment to mark a gypsum deposit, and that was good. Hydrated minerals were common here. There had been a lot of salt water here once. No layers of ice though. I had found some elsewhere. But it wasn’t everywhere.

Then they called me to drag the cable forward again. That required me to circle to get the link at the head of the rail extension, to pull the other end forward another five hundred meters. It was heavy cable, and it scoured the regolith of the canyon floor with deep channels in the sandy surface. I pulled it until it was stretched and then I prepared another hole where it indicated another base for a pylon on the overlay. That made sense to me. We were drilling so many, why drill and leave it? I used the pile driver to pound an eye topped pylon into the ground. When hooked on, we were ready for another run.

Then I headed back to the train to unload my core so they could take it back to Lowell to await analysis. Even though it would mean another transfer, it was the best way. Jouncing it into Lowell wouldn’t improve its condition. Our first sample. I itched to tell Dini about it. Usually, although she listens to me, she has minimal interest in my engineering project. Oh, she feigns interest in order to pacify me, but she doesn’t ask any questions about it. I don’t really understand the complexities of her job, so her professional confidante is Sydney. It is a limitation, but one that most couples cope with.

This time, when I called her about the sample and requested her input, it was completely different. This time she was totally invested in it.

“We should talk about it more later. Right now, just a few things to say. Leave it outside, shielded if you can manage it. It was underground and it won’t like radiation any more than we do. Maintain the temp at ambient. Later we will take it out and take a look. You don’t want to thaw it yet. I will try to replace some biologist through my colleagues on Earth. Maybe they can tell us something. Doubtful, but I will try. And put a monitor and a cam on it. See if it is still emitting methane, or anything else. Got to go. Love you.”

At the least, I was going to get some extra time with her. That would be a benefit in itself. Next, I called Lou.

“I’m coming in with the sample. Dini says we should keep it at Mars temp under shield. The perfect place would be in the storage Quonset. No pressure and open at the ends. We can clear off one of the supply shelves and put our samples on it. There will be more. They found elevated seasonal methane as far as Gale crater in the old days. It may all come from the Valles. Who knows? It is lighter than CO2. But if it turns out to be an emitter, we may have something. It was expensive for us to settle down here, but there may be many more returns from it in the long run. It is worth it to send a few people out in suits to make sure it is properly stored. It’s shielded there anyway. Do we have a hand truck out there? The bits are heavy.”

“I’ll get it ready. Do I get honorable mention in your paper? I smell Nobel.”

’You’ll smell sweat a lot sooner. There’s probably years of work between here and there. And by the time it’s done, we’ll both be footnotes.”

It would be a hike to send more people to the huts. You know the Quonsets couldn’t be placed at the foot of the cliffs because of the slumping from the rockfall. We had chosen hard sights for Lowell, and would do the same for Burroughs, but there was always some avalanche activity. Those cliffs were high and were formed by fracture, not erosion. There were those Marsquakes to undermine them.Even the sites stabilized by meteor strikes close to the rim, tensioning the cliffs in, had rockfall. The slumping was much worse elsewhere. That meant that our railway and structures had to be about a klick from the walls. We could never have constructed a line over the mess at the base of the cliffs. Our covered corridors could suffer damage that could kill or injure people, but it would not be catastrophic.