Red Soil Through Our Fingers

  Red Soil Through Our Fingers

  by N.A. Ratnayake

  Copyright 2016 by Nalin A. Ratnayake

  Smashwords Edition

  Published by Nalin A. Ratnayake

  (naratnayake.com)

  Original cover art by Stephanie Hoover

  (stephanie dot hoover at vosonos dot net)

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase and download an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy from one of the many retailers that list this ebook. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  One

  It felt great to glide. Mahela relished the feeling of bounding through the thin Martian air, above land that was his own to tend. The freedom of motion was a taste of dignity and self-worth. Mahela hadn’t tasted those things in a long time.

  As a teenager on Old Blue, Mahela watched the decline of his physical capability unfold in slow motion until the day his legs refused to respond mid-stride and he fell flat on the hard Mojave ground.

  Even now, he could remember vividly the doctors, the debt, and the new cure that they just hadn’t been able to afford. Ten years later, he was wheelchair-bound, requiring extensive time to move around from place to place.

  Mortified of the possibility that he might be a burden on his family and adamant to prove himself to skeptical employers, Mahela finally persuaded a repair manager at the Mojave Spaceport Authority to try him out. A friend taught him the tools, and he spent the next few weeks taking apart anything and everything he could get his hands on — junked machines, used vehicles, and even the ancient relics in the old aircraft graveyard. He became an accomplished facilities maintenance worker.

  By the time Mahela saw the brochures for the Rekos-Breland colony, he had already been casting his eyes upward for months. Everyone knew it — the real opportunities were off Old Blue. So he saved up and went all in, culminating in that heady day seven years ago when his hands clutched their first fistful of rusted dirt in the Hadriaca Caldera and he felt what life could become.

  Now, Mahela's glide ended at the bottom of a large, vertical outcropping of the gently sloping walls of that caldera. He used his arms and legs to break his motion, gently compressing them like springs, the piezoelectric actuators of the suit's augmentation humming quietly with a touch of added torque.

  Here in the one-third gravity of Red Soil, he was not only less hindered by gravity, but on level footing. On the farm, most of the work was outdoors — and in a spacesuit, everyone used augmentation. He’d just made a few adjustments to the servos to increase their gain. It meant a tad more draw on the power reserves, but he was working on a fix for that too.

  His gaze rested on the closest cluster of lights, just a little more than a kilometer away, shining in the pre-dawn darkness. In the interior reflection from his helmet he caught a twinge of pride flash across his face as he looked on his homestead, Ranasinghe Farm. And why not he be proud of it? The farm was no palace, but he had worked many years to make it what it was.

  Maybe too many years. He stared at his reflection. A face like smooth, dark tree bark, still lean and hard, but with a sag starting to form in the skin under the jaw. And there, the first sign of crow’s feet on the eyes. There had been days when, lost somewhere in a glass of cheap rye whiskey, he was sure it had been too many years for too little gain. But not today.

  Today, that dream was about to take a giant leap forward. After dozens of months counting every penny in the budget and seven straight grow cycles of earning the yield bonus reserved for the very top producers in the colony, he was ready for his most ambitious investment yet.

  It was before the sunrise, and a pale blue glow circled the opposite rim of the caldera far behind them, with the majority of the intervening crater in shadow. At almost eighty kilometers across, the Hadriaca caldera was a smooth, shallow depression in the red planet’s otherwise wrinkled southern highlands. The dome-top lights of over four hundred farms twinkled in the night, the planet’s only luminous response to the billions of clear pinpoints of light in the heavens above. The farms of Hadriaca and their machinery were waking up.

  He turned back to the brightly lit rock wall. Bulbs hung from rods drilled into the slope, angling at a large patch of bare rock in front of him. Soon, it would be a drilled-out hollow, ready to receive a large water tank and eventually the new fish hatchery. At the base of the rock crouched two stocky, three-legged metal stands, each with a round hole in the middle about the diameter of a closed fist.

  Mahela grabbed the light poles for support and looked up at the rust colored face of the outcropping. Above him, a pudgy suited figure leaned over the top edge, peering down at him with hands tightly gripping a support rod.

  A green circle on his HUD ringed the person's face, identifying the person as Ashok Parekh, his newest farmhand. Mahela stared at the circle and blinked twice in quick succession. The circle turned blue and he could now hear heavy breathing.

  “Yes, Mr. Ranasinghe.” The voice on the other end of the comm spoke noticeably accented English. The best-educated social classes in the solar system spoke an Asian or Scandinavian language from birth, regardless of where they were born or the ethnicity of the parents. Ashok was conversant in English, but had a tendency to speak very stiffly and formally.

  “I told you, just Mahela is fine. You doing okay up there?”

  “Ab... absolutely. I have it ready.”

  “I’m not worried about it. I’m worried about you. You seem nervous. This is your bread and butter, right?”

  “I am ready. I went through the checklists. Will this cutter really be able to get through here?”

  “It’s the cheapest one on the list you sent me.”

  “The next model up would have been nice, Mr. Mahela. The robotic one would not require me to be up here holding it.”

  “Well, we can’t afford the lease on that one.”

  There was silence on the other end and Mahela felt his gut wring a little bit. Why was Ashok so uncertain? Maybe the new hire wasn’t used to gravity. Maybe he was nervous and wanted to make a good first impression on the job.

  Mahela shrugged off his worry. He had verified all of Ashok’s licenses before the hire. The guy had credentials coming out his ass. And in their briefing last night, going over today’s drilling operation, Ashok had been supremely knowledgeable about the machine and its capabilities.

  Besides, he was trying to like Ashok since his arrival two weeks ago. Ashok’s skill set was the key to unlocking Mahela’s future plans for the farm, but it was also true that his newest farmhand came from the wealthy orbital settlements of cislunar Earth, bastions of literal high living, lording it over the desiccated, poll
uted slums that now stretched across most of Old Blue. The majority of the settlers of Red Soil, the Belt, and the Outers came from those slums. They left Old Blue to escape the constant living reminders that their lives were of little consequence, so long as families like the Parekhs had their comfort and convenience.

  “Look, Ashok. If you tell me this one will work, I trust your expertise. This fish tank is going to be money enough once we get it done. Let’s just stay calm and cool, and we'll be just fine. Okay, lower it. Nice and easy now.”

  The pudgy figure at the top shakily let go one hand to give a thumbs up, then backed away from the supports slowly to disappear over the top of the ledge. In moments, a flexible, hose-like tube of interlocking metal cylinders appeared over the ledge and began slowly making its way down the rock face. Mahela glanced between the descending end of the hose and the center of the rightmost base in front of him.

  “Left. Left. LEFT. OPERATOR’S LEFT, dammit!”

  “Does the winch need to be… oh, which one is operator’s left?”

  “You’re the one up on the damn rock. Your left. And what about the winch?”

  “Okay. My left. I only thought that since you were the one —”

  “You have done this before right?”

  “I… I have never needed to set up support rods before. Here in the gravity. I thought they were just automatic.”

  Mahela chewed on a corner of his lip. This project was easily the biggest financial risk he had ever taken in his life, besides the decision to come out to Red Soil in the first place. The hiccups in the plan were making him nervous. But he consoled himself. Nothing ever went entirely according to plan, and he was so close to the next milestone. The red flags were no doubt being amplified by his anxious brain.

  The end of the hose dropped within a few meters.

  “Okay, fine. Alright, here it comes. Easy now. Easy.”

  The end of the hose reached him and he guided it into the slot. The hose energized, activating ring-shaped electromagnets all along its length, causing the cylindrical links to snap together. The hose was now a stiff column ready to support weight.

  “Fine. Lower the other.” The two men repeated the process without incident.

  The pre-dawn sky reminded Mahela of hazy light filtering in through a thick curtain. The sun would rise soon. He had hoped to be cutting into the cliff side by daybreak, so they were slightly behind schedule. No matter. He could make up the difference once they got going.

  “Solid. Okay, Ashok. I think we’re set. Ready when you are.”

  “Okay, here I come.”

  Over the ledge came a bulky gunmetal device that struck Mahela as a robotic cartoon abstraction of an elephant’s head. It was about the same size as one, for starters. Two large handles flanked an angular center module, from the front of which protruded a straight tube — the laser cutter. Two curled, tusk-like arms gripped the twin support rods, and a thick power cable extended from the top of the machine.

  Ashok rode in a seat bolted to the back end of the laser cutter, using the controls to lower the contraption centimeter by careful centimeter. The laser cutter slid down into the relative darkness between the reach of the top and bottom floodlights. If he squinted, Mahela could still see the dark silhouette against the rusted ash-gray of dawn.

  Mahela took his eyes off the descending piece of equipment to sweep his gaze along the face of the outcropping. Fifteen by five meters of this cliff face would be carved out to a depth of three meters. This was going to take weeks. That was fine — the live fish eggs he ordered only left Earth a few days ago. It would be another two and a half months before they arrived at Dao-Hellas spaceport, a couple hours train ride to the south.

  Ashok’s voice interrupted his mental planning.

  “Mahela, maybe a problem. I’m not sure if the winch holding the laser cutter is — Oh!”

  Mahela felt a shuddering in the support rods. The vibration produced a sound that made Mahela think of a pissed off Mojave Green rattler stuck inside a metal pipe.

  A terrified wail filled his comm.

  He looked up and time slowed. The first thing he actually noticed was something very beautiful. The sun had just risen over the ridge line on the opposite rim of the caldera, and the terminator – the line that separated night from day – swept daylight down the slope toward him. The light overtook the laser cutter, blasting it with sunshine and making it glow against the dusty red rock of the escarpment behind it as it fell.

  On Old Blue, Mahela would already have been dead. But here, the machine accelerated slowly, almost pillow-like. For a moment, Mahela’s Earth-evolved primate brain was deceived into thinking that the laser cutter and its operator were only a third of their actual mass. It actually seemed possible that he could catch the cutter. Fortunately for Mahela, a more basic neural circuit recalled from hardwired lore that primate versus large flying rock-thing carried poor odds for primate. Instinct jerked his limbs into action.

  Through a combination of an augmented kick from his suit and a hard yank on a support strut, Mahela managed to dive clear of the falling elephant head. The strength of his dive was overkill. He flew nearly twenty five meters and fell hard on his hip, immediately feeling the suit’s water bladder rupture.

  The outer lining of the suit held, fortunately, but drinking water now splurted into his nearly skin-tight suit. Mahela’s whole body from the neck seal down was quickly wrapped in a thin slick of sweaty water. It felt disgusting. He wanted to tear his suit off immediately.

  Daylight now washed the bluff. Mahela could see Ashok clearly now. His new farmhand had fallen with the laser cutter, landing just beside it. The right arm of the white space suit flailed wildly while the left arm draped across the chest at an absurd angle.

  Mahela winced and his arm muscles tightened involuntarily on seeing the injury.

  “Ashok! Oh shit. Ashok! What the fuck. Ashok!”

  Mahela was only dimly aware of clambering back down the slope towards body, the water in his suit sticking and sliding between the suit and skin. He was trying to run, but his legs felt sluggish and jittery. The augmentors in the suit were sticking, probably damaged in the fall, and he could barely manage more than a hobbling trot over the uneven, rocky terrain.

  Ashok had probably landed on his comm radio and couldn’t respond. Should he call in a MedEvac? They could make it from Hadriaca Center in ten minutes, maybe twelve. Maybe enough to avert complete asphyxiation if Ashok had a few minutes left of air. But expensive. And the farm would have to eat that cost regardless of whether Ashok needed it or not. Might even put Mahela another whole year into debt to Rekos-Breland, just when he was on the verge of breaking even.

  “Mahela to home, emergency. Taliyah, wake up! E-shelter and med unit. Caldera wall, near the tank site. Emergency! Do it now.”

  He kept hobbling. A female voice popped into his ears. “Home to Mahela, understood. Two of the hands are with me. We are suiting up. Out there ASAP.”

  “Ashok, can you hear me? Give me a thumbs up, a wave, something!”

  Now that he moved closer, Mahela could see that Ashok’s left foot was under the laser cutter, probably crushed. The head was twitching and rolling. Ashok was obviously in terrible pain, if he was even conscious. Might even be in shock.

  So that was it then. Even if it set his dream back yet one more year… this was a human life. His farm ledger would have to understand.

  Mahela stared at the red medical icon in the upper right of his HUD and blinked at it five times.

  A klaxon sounded in his helmet. Somewhere in Hadriaca, he knew that a drone MedEvac would now be springing into the thin Martian air.

  Two

  “Dao Vallis North,” intoned a neutrally pleasant female voice. “Spirit Plaza, Rekos-Breland corporate offices. Change here for regional service to Niger Vallis settlements.”

  Yoo Sun-Hee tapped her feet as she waited for the people in front of her to disembark. It was the morning commute. The internal transit sys
tem in Dao was only a few years old, and already it was bursting at the seams with the influx of new settlers and families. Although the train was crowded, even unfamiliar faces gave her a respectful zone of room.

  She wore a fitted gray skirt-suit with shockingly red nail polish that matched both her lipstick and the color of the logo on her badge. It was a logo that anyone living in the Hellas-Dao Colony would recognize immediately. When combined with her the brisk step, the unflinching gaze, and the clearly imported clothing, it didn't take a genius to peg her as an executive of Rekos-Breland.

  Anyone anywhere in the northeast periphery of the Hellas basin knew they were owned by Rekos-Breland Xenomaterials Corporation. They owed RBX for the transit from Earth, for their plots of land or apartments, for the startup capital for their farms or businesses and for the equipment and the power to run them. Yes, and for the hope of a better future, away from Earth and its troubles and on a blank slate to start fresh. They owed RBX for all that, and probably more - everything in the fine print on the invoice they didn't notice until after the signature, or maybe still hadn't noticed.

  “Excuse me, madam,” said a man who brushed by her, turning with an apologetic look on a slowly reddening pale face. He spoke forced Hindi. “I ought to have asking before trying to going by. I was not looking.”

  Sun-Hee looked him directly in the eyes through her nearly-transparent data glasses, one eyebrow raised, and the rest of her face a mask. She waited one beat after she noticed him swallow and his gaze flicker and then gave him a tight smile that did not extend to her eyes. She then looked directly at the RBX badge clipped to his chest, pretending to read the name imprinted there before stepping past him without a word and returning her face to neutral.

  Let him wonder for a few days if he’s in trouble, whoever he is.

  She exited the train and ascended the escalator to Spirit Plaza, the large clear dome that served as a hub for the various buildings that made up the corporate offices of Rekos-Breland Mars. It was one of the few pressurized spaces on the planet that was almost entirely above ground. The massive structure of mirrored, radiation-shielded Plexiglas and magnesium-steel supports was a gleaming monument to power that few entities could afford to build and maintain anywhere on the red planet.