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By Root 2505 0

down into the cockpit and checked the weather report on the AI. A katabatic wind was pouring down Kasei Vallis and onto Chryse Gulf. A howler, as the Kasei fliers would say. The AI should have warned them. But like many katabatic storms it had come up in an hour, and was still a fairly local phenomenon. Yet strong for all that; the boat was on a roller-coaster ride, shimmying under hammer blows of air as it shot up and down on the huge groundswell. To the side the waves looked like they were being knocked over by the wind, but the boat’s skittering flights up and down showed that they underlay the flying foam as big as ever. Overhead the mast sail had contracted almost to a pole, in the shape of an aerodynamic foil. Sax leaned over to check the AI more closely; the volume knob on the beeper was turned all the way down. So perhaps it had tried to warn them after all.

A squall at sea; they came up fast. Horizons only four kilometers away didn’t help matters; and the winds on Mars had never slowed down much, in all the years of thickening. Underfoot the boat shuddered as it smashed through some invisible fragments of ice. Brash ice now, it appeared, or the broken pancake ice of a sea surface that had been about to freeze over in the night; difficult to spot in all the flying foam. Occasionally he felt the impact of a larger chunk, bergy bergs as sailors called them. These had come through the Chryse Strait on a current from the north; now they were being pushed against the lee shore of the southern side of the Sinai Peninsula. As the boat was too, for that matter.

They were forced to cover the cockpit with its clear shell, rolling up out of the decking and over to the other side. Under its waterproof cover they were immediately warmer, which was a comfort. It was going to be a true howler, Kasei Vallis serving as a conduit for an extremely powerful blast of air; the AI listed wind speeds at Santorini Island fluctuating between 180 and 220 kilometers an hour, winds which would not diminish much in speed as they crossed the gulf. Certainly it was still a very strong wind, 160 kilometers an hour at the masthead; the surface of the water was disintegrating now, crests flattened by gusts, torn apart. The ship was shutting down in response to all that, mast retracting, cockpit covered, hatches battening; then the sea anchor went out, a tube of material like a wind sock, dragging underwater upwind of them, slowing their drift to leeward, and mitigating the jarring impacts against small icebergs that were becoming more frequent as they all clustered against the lee shore. Now with the sea anchor in place, it was the brash ice and bergy bergs that were floating downwind faster than they were, and knocking against the windward hull, even as the leeward hull still slammed against a thickening ice mass. Both hulls were mostly underwater; in effect the boat was becoming a kind of submarine, lying at the surface and just under it. The strength of the materials of the boat could sustain any shock that even a howler and a lee shore of icebergs could deliver; indeed they could sustain forces several magnitudes stronger. But the weak point, as Sax reflected as he was thrown hard against his seat belt and shoulder harness, holding grimly to the tiller and his seatback, was their bodies. The catamaran lifted on a swell, dropped with a sickening swoop, crashed to a halt against a big berg; and he slammed breathlessly into the restraints. It seemed they might be in danger of being shaken to death, an unpleasant way to go, as he was beginning to understand. Internal organs damaged by seat belts; but if they freed themselves they would be flung around the cockpit, into each other or into something sharp, until something broke or burst. No. It was not a tenable situation. Possibly the restraints he had seen on his bed’s frame would be gentler, but the decelerations when the boat struck the ice mass were so abrupt that he doubted being horizontal would help much.

“I’m going to see if the AI can get us into Arigato Bay,” he shouted in Ann’s ear. She