The First Sol

Vostok Settlement on Mars, Mars Year 69, Sol 48

(January 2083)

The Arrival

Elena Markova felt in every cell of her body that she was entering a new world once again. They were still floating in weightlessness. She tied back her unruly blond hair and began preparing. She was nervous, but she was determined not to let it show. There were four others in her rotation. They had been shut up together for four months in this skyscraper-sized transport ship, but if Elena had had the choice, she would not have spent two minutes in the same enclosed space as them.

And there were still ninety minutes to go before the descent began.

During that time they secured the objects still drifting around them, locked the personal lockers, shut down the non-essential onboard modules, and put on their revolting Sokol M emergency pressure suits. The mere thought of putting hers on already turned Elena's stomach.

First she fitted the biomedical sensors that clung to her skin.

The moment the system came to life, there was no hiding anything. The display facing her seat spelled out her condition with cold cruelty. Her heart was beating too fast. Her muscles were tense. Low HRV. Ragged breathing. Risk of hyperventilation.

She did not look to the side right away. She did not want to see the others. Then she glanced over anyway, and that was the only comfort: apparently, they were in no better shape than she was.

No one spoke.

When at last all five of them had squeezed themselves into the seats of the descent vehicle, only sixty minutes remained. The protocol's robotic voice listed the tasks impassively, almost politely.

Secure thigh and shoulder harnesses.

All five passengers moved almost in unison.

Secure pelvic restraint.

Secure rear helmet restraint.

Secure leg restraints.

Hands on the chest grips or the side handles.

Activate the Automed standby sequence.

Switch the personal display to EDL mode.

They had rehearsed these movements countless times during training on Earth. They did not even need to remember them. The protocol read out everything step by step. The Automed system prepared the anti-nausea intervention, the non-pharmacological treatment of a panic reaction, and the compression support needed to stabilize circulation. During training all of this had sounded like a dull list. Now, as the expected symptoms flared up in her body one after another, Elena would have liked nothing better than to inject herself with everything the injectors contained.

They followed the protocol in silence, all the while acting as if the data on their screens had nothing to do with them. Elena knew they were in as bad a shape as she was, because this time they did not even try to mock her. The inner rim of each helmet also held a vomit collar, a soft, absorbent emergency measure lined with suction channels, which everyone in training had pretended was not humiliating.

Twenty minutes before reaching the Martian atmosphere, the descent vehicle separated from the cargo ship with a dull clunk. A short, deep engine impulse pressed them into their seats: the deorbit burn committed the vehicle to its atmospheric-entry trajectory. For months Elena had lived in a large, slow ship whose corridors and common modules made the descent vehicle seem cramped by comparison. Now she clung to the restraints in terror, huddled in a capsule whose only function was to survive the encounter with the Martian atmosphere. The display showed reddish-orange data graphs, and when they finally reached the edge of the atmosphere, a deep, menacing roar came from the direction of the heat shield. The cabin began to tremble gently at first, then gave way to a vibration so brutal that the harnesses cut into her limbs. Tiny beads of condensation gathered on the inner wall of the helmet, thickening into a foggy patch in the center. For a while Elena tried to focus only on her own breathing. The Sokol M's internal system sensed the stress reaction, increased the airflow to the helmet, and flashed a slow, cold rhythm at the edge of the display: breathe.

Suddenly she felt a pressure on her chest as if someone had knelt on it. Her stomach churned, her field of vision narrowed, and she thought she was going to faint. Mars did not welcome them. They slammed into it.

"Markova, check the cargo spine lock!" the commander's voice cut into the helmet's comm system.

Elena did not care for the man in his fifties, whom age alone had made rotation commander on the pilotless, fully autonomous ship. She reminded herself: in Russia, where there are two people, one of them always has to be the commander. What no one could explain to her was why they had chosen as commander a man who read even the system files aloud as if they were protocol instructions. Still, right now she was grateful for the task, because it pulled her back from the edge of fainting. She switched displays and immediately noticed that one of the cargo spine sensors was showing fluctuating values. During intense deceleration, a multi-ton component package was not cargo but a projectile waiting to break loose inside the vehicle. Elena compared the reading with those from the other two independent sensors. It was not a sensor fault; the restraint really had slipped a hair's breadth. She issued the command to activate the backup tensioner so that it would take up the gap; the main latch still held, this was only the fail-safe's fail-safe. She tried to keep her answer as short as possible, so as not to throw up in the middle of the sentence.

"Done."

The heat shield separated with an enormous crash, followed by a new kind of vibration. The underside of the craft opened, the retropropulsion kicked in, and dozens of sensors and radars guided the lander toward the Vostok settlement.

"The wind's buried the pad again," said Elena's neighbor, the twenty-three-year-old Igor, who for four months had talked about his thirst for adventure until it became clear to everyone that he was in fact running from the army. Elena glanced around in surprise, trying to see what the boy had read it from; she found it hard to believe the observation was his own.

"The system is comparing the actual terrain with the landing map right now. It'll find the base," Elena remarked. Of the five passengers she was the most highly trained. That, of course, brought her not one step closer to being allowed to command. Her words were followed, like a prophecy come to life, by the system's announcement:

"Primary landing site unavailable. Switching to the backup receiving pad."

A sharp crackle came over the comm channel. At first nothing could be made out, but all five of them jerked their heads up. For months they had not communicated in real time with the outside world.

"What's up, guys? Coming in through the back door?"

The man behind the brassy voice violated several points of the prescribed protocol in the span of two sentences, but even that did not stop the newcomers from nearly leaping out of their seats with joy.

"Vostok, that's how we like it," the rotation commander guffawed.

Elena rolled her eyes at the crude humor, but the truth was that her own heart was pounding in her throat at finally hearing a real human voice from the outside world. The cabin no longer shook the way it had on entering the atmosphere; instead, deep, rhythmic jolts ran through it. At first they pressed her into the seat, then began wrenching her back and forth, until at last everything grew lighter. About four thousand two hundred meters above the surface, Elena noticed that the pressure curve of one engine's combustion chamber lagged the command by the blink of an eye, and the controller then overcorrected. The navigation smoothed it over; it was no catastrophe, but for Elena that was enough. Old valve, worn actuator. The system had aged.

The landing was not smooth. That first encounter was enough for the young engineer to understand: on Mars, that word was better forgotten. Here nothing goes smoothly. From the capsule they could see nothing through the enormous dust cloud thrown up by the engines, but the clang of the landing leg, a hard sideways tilt, and the flash of the protocol's "Engines shut down" signal left no doubt that they had arrived. Suddenly all noise ceased. Her own breathing grew strangely loud, and a long-forgotten sensation returned: as if her stomach and her arm were being pulled downward. Weight. Not as much as on Earth, but weight. Compared to the past four months of weightlessness, even this was a brutal return to the body.

For at least ten more minutes nothing happened. The system ran an automatic check: it examined the remaining propellant and the hot surfaces of the shut-down engines, the tilt angle of the structure and of the landing legs, the settling of the debris thrown up by the engines, the external pressure, the dust load and the electrostatic charge, the passengers' suits and their seals. And, above all, the physical condition of the new arrivals.

They waited out those ten minutes in dead silence. As she stared at the display, Elena did not know why, but the red light of the Siberian checkpoint came back to her: day after day she had fooled the Chinese guards there and smuggled parts and food to the encircled population. She had thought things could not get any worse; it had been hell itself. But back then she did not yet know Mars.

At the end of the ten-minute window the displays spelled out, one by one, the individual disembarkation clearances. Beside Elena's name it was not a green signal that lit up but a yellow one: FIT TO WALK, ESCORT REQUIRED. Her vision still kept narrowing, her stomach churned, and out of caution the system had assigned an escort to her. To be escorted. Like a patient. Elena clenched her teeth.

Then the protocol's voice announced cabin depressurization. With a series of hisses, the cabin pressure fell in stages to the Martian near-vacuum, and as the umbilical connectors clicked free, their suits switched to autonomous life support. "Cabin pressure equalized. Autonomous suit operation stable," the machine reported.

A strip of light sliced across the deck as the loading ramp came down. The vibration of the servos reached her through the floor and through the suit; through the thin air she heard almost nothing of the metallic grinding itself. But when the ramp struck the ground, she felt the impact deep through her entire body.

The Sokol M was not a surface work suit. Once disconnected from the umbilical, the suit kept its wearer alive on its own reserves: twenty minutes of guaranteed autonomy, up to forty under light demand. The oxygen supply, the CO₂ scrubbing and the thermal regulation were all sized for the same span; the battery held just enough energy to keep the fan and radio running from the ramp to the receiving airlock. That was all it promised. Nothing more.

Instinctively she raised her hand to wipe her face, but her fingers merely tapped against the clear polycarbonate visor.

"Come on," she muttered to herself. "Just one step."

She stood up. The display blinked yellow: WAIT FOR THE ESCORT. HOLD ON. Elena did not wait. Her muscles protested against the returning gravitational load, a burden her body had forgotten during the long months in microgravity. She took a step toward the ramp, then stumbled and dropped to her knees on the metal plating, already soiled with Martian dust.

Her breathing echoed, ragged, inside the helmet. Elena suddenly curled in on herself and began to retch. She tried to hold it back, but the acidic fluid surging up from her stomach struck the vomit collar and spattered the inside of her helmet with a fine spray. Under the collar something came to life at once: with a soft hiss it drew the fluid away from her face into a sealed pouch, and blew a cold jet of air onto the center of the visor, giving Elena a narrow view through the fog. The display switched from yellow to red: MEDICAL ALERT. A technician was already hurrying toward her from the receiving airlock.

At the foot of the ramp stood a tall, grim figure in a Mars surface suit. Major Ivanov. For a moment he only watched Elena as she struggled to push herself upright on the dust-covered ramp. An ironic smile lurked in his voice as he remarked:

"Nicely done. Welcome to Mars, Markova. The planet needs no introduction, I see. You can already feel it."

First Evening in the Settlement Canteen

The tired rays of fluorescent tubes bounced off the cold metal walls of the canteen. The monotonous hum of the air filters pulsed through the room like some distant, sickly heartbeat. Clutching her tray, Elena looked for a free seat in the corner, as far as possible from the staring eyes.

Men and women sat at the tables, all of them Martian veterans. Their faces were pallid, their eyes tired but alert. They followed the newcomer the way one watches a freshly installed part: will it hold up under load, or will it fail on its very first day.

Elena sat down. Her knees buckled as she lowered herself, and the metal chair screeched beneath her. The synthetic puree sloshing on her tray was odorless, tasteless, and after the very first spoonful it threatened to come back up in a retching wave. She had tried to sleep for a few hours, but apparently her body still had not accepted the new reality.

She avoided people's eyes. Instead she studied the ceiling and the walls.

It struck her quickly that the people who had originally built the station had taken care to route the cables into covered channels and recessed grooves. By now that was a memory at best. The cables ran freely along the walls and ceiling, fixed with electrical tape wherever the mounts had long since failed. The result of repairs like these was always the same: only parts of the system still worked.

Some parts of the room were decently lit. Other corners, though, were wrapped in near-total darkness. It was hard to tell whether this was deliberate or had simply turned out that way.

Elena retreated into one of those darker corners. But she was hardly inconspicuous.

A shadow fell across the table in front of her. A tall woman stood before her.

She wore a close-fitting dark-gray technical uniform, with reinforced panels on the chest and shoulders and a wide tool belt at the waist. The tool belt was clearly no ornament.

The woman's lean, bony face stayed motionless; her blue eyes measured Elena with the precision of a cutting tool, as if searching out her weak points. Her hair was pulled tightly back, her features taut, as if gravity had dragged down not only her limbs but the muscles of her face as well.

She wore neither insignia of rank nor name tag; her presence alone signaled her authority clearly enough.

"Markova?" she asked dryly.

Elena nodded.

"We start at five," the woman said, and was already turning away, back into the gloom of the canteen, as if she had merely filed away some administrative package.

Elena watched her vanishing figure for a long moment, then, staring at the puree, she muttered under her breath:

"I'm fine, by the way. Thanks."

A wiry, middle-aged man at the next table turned in his seat and jabbed a bony finger toward the departing woman:

"Lyudmila…"

Elena flinched.

"What?" she asked dryly.

The man shrugged. Not his problem if the woman was jumpy.

"The chief engineer. Lyudmila Vetrova. Don't expect any praise from her."

Before Elena could answer, shouts rang out from the back of the room:

"What's this, Volkov? Taken a liking to the little rookie? Even an old goat likes a lick of salt, eh?"

"Look who's got a big mouth now, you little snot," Volkov grumbled without looking over. Then he glanced at Elena. "This lot's no better, but at least they don't bite. A few days, and they'll get used to your face. And you to the air."

Elena forced a faint smile. She knew that here even a smile was currency.

"Elena," she said.

"Misha Volkov," the man introduced himself. "If you need anything, you know where to find me."

Elena reached for her tray to leave, but the moment she straightened up, her muscles betrayed her again. Caught in gravity's trap, she teetered and pitched forward in full view of the entire canteen. The tray slid from her hand with a dull clatter. Elena's body had not yet grown used to the new rules. As she stood, her circulation, still adapted to microgravity, failed for a moment to keep her brain properly supplied with blood; by the time her heart caught up, her legs had already sent her momentum the wrong way. It was not simple clumsiness: her circulation and her sense of motion were still tuned to the rules of weightlessness.

For a moment, there was frozen silence. Then, as if the whole room had been waiting for just this moment, the laughter broke out. Loud, gut-deep, tearful guffawing that echoed even among the steel girders of the ceiling.

Misha Volkov came over to help her up, but Elena, red-faced and with clenched teeth, wrenched herself free of his grip. She started toward the door, but her momentum carried her too far. She could not stop and slammed full-force into the metal doorframe.

Now the laughter made it seem as if the whole base were shaking with them. The miners slapped one another on the back.

Cursing, Elena staggered out of the canteen, her words swallowed by the noise of the closing door.

Inside, the laughter continued for several more minutes. Only Elena did not know that this played out in exactly the same way with every new arrival window. And they all still remembered their own first evening, when Mars had forced them to their knees.