Cold War - Jerome Preisler [3]
Scarborough’s mouth turned down in a private frown under his balaclava. Shevaun Bradley and David Payton were robotics experts who had been on the ice just over six weeks and planned to leave before final sunset, winging off to civilization aboard a Hercules LC-150 ski transport. Not so for Scarborough. Well into his second eighteen-month hitch with the station’s winter-over support crew, he had learned from unpleasant experience that tensions could build fast in shared isolation. The stickiest situations often occurred between habituated polies and summer personnel contingents, and part of his role as expeditionary guide was to lubricate the gears, so to speak. He knew Bradley a little and didn’t think she’d be a challenge on that score. Payton was another story.
Scarborough made his way toward the techies over wide beds of gravel and patches of bare bedrock that had been scrubbed to a shiny smoothness by time and weather. Stone chips crunched beneath the rubber soles of his boots. Boulders were scattered everywhere around him, many of knee height or smaller, some dwarfing the group’s transportable apple hut. The most imposing rocks Scarborough had seen lay back in the direction of camp, a tumbled expanse that had proven sheer murder to negotiate. Carved out of the highland plateau by monumental glacial flows in the Paleozoic, bereft of rainfall for an estimated two million years, the entire landscape might have been transported from another world in some weird cosmic version of a skin graft . . . which, of course, was precisely why it was chosen as the site of the rover’s trial run. According to planetary geologists, no place on Earth bore a closer resemblance to Mars.
Scarborough stopped beside Payton, waited to be acknowledged, and was ignored.
He made a loud affair of clearing his throat. “Any luck? We’re close to where Scout fell off our screens.”
Still examining the ground, Payton merely shook his head.
Bradley was more responsive. “We weren’t expecting much,” she said. “Scout traversed the area. I’m certain from the feeds it sent before our link broke. But its wheels probably couldn’t have left imprints in this stony surface.”
Scarborough considered that a moment.
“My sat maps show lots of sand in the lower pass, close to where it hooks into Wright,” he said. “Sand cover holds tracks, and the rover’s would be damned hard to miss. There’re no other mechanical ponies on the range.”
His last remark prompted a mild chuckle from Bradley.
“Cute,” she said.
Payton finally looked up at Scarborough. “Scout isn’t some twenty-five-cent children’s ride,” he said curtly, sharing none of his colleague’s amusement. “We should move on instead of wasting our time here.”
Scarborough hesitated. Restraint, he thought. As the rover’s project director, Payton was used to the golden-boy treatment, and seemed miffed that even an act of God could screw with his agenda. He had urged an immediate start to their recovery mission, but a chain of sudden Force 10 storms with winds blowing at upward of sixty miles per hour—base meteorologists called them weather bombs—had imposed a week’s delay. A week of hand-wringing and restless conjecture. It was understandable that he’d be wound tight. His superior attitude was more exasperating.
“Okay,” Scarborough said in a controlled tone. “Let’s go.”
And so they did, Scarborough leading in silence for better than a mile. True to his prediction, the pass’s terrain changed radically toward its juncture with Wright Valley. Sand the color of tarnished copper first sprinkled its gritty