BOUNDARY(132)

Joe understood what she meant. John Carter was the expedition's only surface-to-space vehicle. If they couldn't survive on the surface of Mars for quite a while, there wasn't a thing anyone on Nike could do to save them. "We may all join Ryu Sakai soon enough," he muttered.



"Not if I can help it," Madeline said briskly. "I said 'chancy,' not 'dim.' On the positive side, only one of us is injured, our suits are all in working order, and the filters and rebreathers will give us considerable functioning time before we have to worry about running out of air. So we're not in immediate danger. The key thing is the rover. If we can just get the rover out of the wreck, I think we'll have an excellent chance."



She knelt beside Joe and probed his leg through the suit. "A.J., can you verify a fracture using the sensors we have?"



"No problem, with both your sensors and his." After a moment he said: "Yep. Clean break, but it's not lined up right. The suit can be forced into rigid mode in that area, though, so if you can manage to set the bone, I can trigger a splint."



"That means she's going to hurt me, right?"



Helen had arrived by then, and smiled down at him. "Look at it this way, Joe. We only hurt the ones we love."



"Listen, mates, keep the foreplay private."



Madeline ignored the byplay, as she considered the situation. "I need to make sure you're still when I do this, Joe. The low gravity may make that . . . interesting."



She glanced around. "Okay. Since you're still in the seat and still strapped down, we may as well use that as a harness. Hold tight onto the armrests. Hopefully your weight and the seat's will keep you still long enough. Helen, do your best to keep him steady. I'd suggest grabbing his shoulders."



Helen did so. Joe got his arms locked around the armrests. "Go ahead."



"Ready, A.J.?"



"Say the word."



"Trying . . . now."



A blaze of white-hot pain stabbed up from the vicinity of his shin. Joe grunted or screamed, he wasn't sure which, but held on as the tension increased. He felt the chair quiver, and then suddenly felt something clamp firmly down the length of his leg.



"That's got it!" A.J. exclaimed. "Good work, Madeline. It's set and I've locked the splint down."



"How are you feeling, Joe?" There was concern in her voice now, unlike the flat and professional tone in which she'd spoken earlier.



"Be . . . all right, I think. Just let me rest a little, turn up the heat in my suit a bit, and get a drink. Minor shock, probably."



She brought up his biometric display on her suit HUD. "Yes. But you should be okay."



"I'll key an alarm in, just in case." A.J. said. "Joe, you just rest until you're sure you're up to moving."



"Don't worry, I'm not dumb. I'll sit here and admire the view."



A.J. paused. "Yeah. That's a hell of a view."



Sharply defined against the light pink of the horizon sky, only slightly softened by the distance, the five-kilometer-high walls of Valles Marineris reared their impenetrable bulk. It was the greatest canyon in the Solar System, and looked the part. The scalloped, gully-ridged sides demarcated an uncrossable barrier. Between the atmosphere-softened light and traces of dust or sand in the air, the distant surfaces seemed to have a dreamlike patina of lighter shades of rose and pearl.



Other, lesser ridges jutted at intervals like rocky knife edges, barring any direct route across the bottom of the mighty canyon. Dust and sand and rocks covered the floor of Valles Marineris, the latter mostly rounded from tumbling in the long-vanished waters and from millions of years of low-pressure sandblasting. Though the predominant colors were reds and pinks and oranges, there was a profusion of other colors, as well. White splashes on some areas; dark, almost black sands and gray-black rocks; a shocking glint of yellow, flashes of light from feldspar or quartz or mica. It was a wild, utterly untouched view, under an alien sky without a contrail or a cloud or any sign of life other than themselves. Joe felt it finally sinking in that he was actually, truly, and really on Mars, the first human being ever to touch the soil of the Red Planet.



He just hoped he wasn't about to end up the second person buried there.





Chapter 42




Helen studied the generated imagery from the Fairy Dust A.J. had managed to insinuate into the stuck cargo hold area. "So the pin's twisted around and in the way?"



"Looks like it," Joe said, from his position now propped up against a boulder near the lander. "If we'd kept trying to slide it, we'd be at this forever. I think if we pull up and out a bit, though, we could get it to pop free, and then we could slide it the rest of the way."