Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [137]
“Hmm.” Michel had been out in some hard blows before, but in the dark one couldn’t be sure if this was worse than those or not. It certainly seemed like it, and the rover anemometer was now registering gusts of 230 kilometers per hour, but in the lee of their little mesa it was unclear whether these represented true maximums or not.
He checked the fines gauge, and was not surprised to find it was now a full-blown dust storm as well. “Let’s drive down closer,” Maya said. “It will get us there quicker, and make it easier to relocate the car as well.”
“Good idea.”
They sat in the drivers’ seats and took off. Out of the shelter of the mesa, the wind was ferocious. At one point the bouncing grew so severe it felt as if they might be flipped over, and if they had been side-on to the wind, they might have been; as it was, with the wind behind them, they rolled on at fifteen kilometers per hour when they should have been going ten, and the motor hummed unhappily as it braked the car from going even faster. “This is too much wind, isn’t it?” Maya asked.
“I don’t think Coyote has much control over it.”
“Guerrilla climatology,” Maya said with a snort. “That man is a spy, I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t think so.”
The cameras showed nothing but a starless black rush. The car’s AI was guiding them by dead reckoning, and on the screen’s map they were shown within two kilometers from the outer bank’s southernmost tent. “We’d better walk from here,” Michel said.
“How will we find the car again?”
“We’ll have to get out the Ariadne thread.”
They suited up and got in the lock. When the outer door slid open the air sucked out instantly, pulling them hard. The wind keened across the doorway.
They stepped out of the lock and were slammed by great blows to the back. One knocked Michel to his hands and knees, and he could just see through the dust to Maya, in the same position beside him. He reached back into the lock and took the thread reel in one hand, Maya’s hand in the other. He clipped the reel to his forearm.
By careful experiment they found they could stand if they stayed crouched forward, helmets at waist level and hands up and ready to catch themselves if they were knocked down. They stumbled ahead slowly, crashing down when strong gusts made it impossible to stand. The ground under them was just barely visible, and a knee striking a rock was all too possible. Coyote’s wind had indeed come down too strong. But there was nothing to be done about it. And clearly the inhabitants of the Kasei tents were not going to be out wandering around.
A gust knocked them down again, and Michel let the wind pour over him. It was hard to keep from being rolled. His wristpad was connected to Maya’s by a phone cord, and he said, “Maya, are you all right?”
“Yes. And you?”
“I’m okay.”
Though there seemed to be a small tear in his glove, over the ball of his thumb. He bunched his fist, felt the cold seeping up his wrist. Well, it wouldn’t be instant frostbite the way it used to be, nor pressure bruising. He took a suit patch from his wristpad compartment, stuck it on. “I think we’d better stay down like this.”
“We can’t crawl two kilometers!”
“We can if we have to.”
“But I don’t think we do. Just stay low, and be ready to go down.”
“Okay.”
They stood again, bent double, and shuffled cautiously forward. Black dust flew past them with amazing rapidity. Michel’s navigation display lit his faceplate, down in front of his mouth: the first bubble tent was still a kilometer away, and to his astonishment the green numbers of the clock showed 11:15:16— they had been out an hour. The howl of the wind made it hard to hear Maya, even with his intercom right against his ear. Over on the inner bank Coyote and the others, and the Red groups as well, were presumably making their raid on the living quarters— but there was no way of telling. They had to take it on faith that the shocking wind had not halted that part of the action, or slowed it down too much.
It was hard work to shuffle forward doubled