Find Mars-The Red Planet at Bookfinder.Com
Search Bibliofind
Search AbeBooks

Irina Orlov put one foot in front of the other. She stared fixedly down at the red dirt of the trail and tried as hard as she could to think of nothing. The fast flash of the Martian dawn had come and gone, and the sun was already climbing into the relentlessly pink sky. Toward the horizon, there were the faintest wisps of early morning ghost clouds. The scenery gave the illusion that the prisoners were marching straight toward the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons, which, although still hundreds of kilometers away, totally dominated the landscape. It seemed to loom over them like some sinister eventual fate, but in reality their eventual fate was a long way beyond Olympus Mons.
    They had marched away from the Silver Locust in the first light and long shadows, feeling that they were once again leaving even the most minimum shelter of civilization and walking into a hostile unknown. The seemingly endless expanse of drab red dirt and washed-out pink sky that lay in front of them exactly matched the dead resignation they felt inside. The march itself was not particularly strenuous in the low gravity-it was the constant fear that proved to be the most exhausting factor. The flimsy emergency suits were simply not designed to stand up to the prolonged stress of a march across the Martian surface. As she walked, lrina waited for the first tear or rip or puncture, the resulting rush of air to the near vacuum, and the sudden and final eruption of foaming blood and pain that was explosive decompression. Already, in the first two hours out of the Silver Locust, one prisoner had gone down. He or she - lrina knew absolutely nothing about the day's first victim - had simply been left to lie, covered by the fine red spray of his or her own blood. The body would remain there, perfectly preserved, until some passerby took pity and buried it or the void crazies who prowled the trail carried it away for their own weird purposes. With death such a regular occurrence, no one could forget how fragile and vulnerable they were.
    The fear might have been the exhausting part, but the silence was the eeriest: a mass of people moving together in unison but without the background of small sounds that made them human. Even in their misery, there should have been sighs, cries, and quiet groans. Instead, there was nothing. It was as though they were already dead spirits. After they had left the Silver Locust, Perovsky had ordered radio silence among the nonprisoners. lrina could not see the point of the order, but she had noticed that when in doubt, Perovsky tended to issue orders. He seemed to take a certain comfort from the action. Back at the Silver Locust, she had watched Perovsky carefully, telling herself that if she was observant enough, she would spot some flaw that she could exploit to form the basis for an escape plan. But out there on the surface, under the pink sky, she could no longer pretend that the idea of escape was anything but futile. Even if a miracle happened and she was able to slip away unnoticed, how far would she get on foot in a disposable pressure suit?
    Irina Orlov put one foot in front of the other and tried not to think.