Chapter Twenty Two

Beck wasn’t thinking about Lisbet anymore. That was what she thought as he looked out the window of the Buckshot and watched the land rover fall atop a sand dune with as much ceremony as someone dropping a garbage bag. The drone that brought it flew away with more speed than it came in with. The rover must have been too heavy for it.

Beck looked at the vehicle in the sand with a grim expression on his face. He had been hoping for something better.

Lisbet was watching over his shoulder and saw the land rover. It was kind of like a tank in that it had none of the agility of a helocarrier and none of the speed of a solarship.

“Does that worry you?” she asked, letting her breath curl around his ear with the words.

Beck refrained from rubbing his ear against his shoulder and said in hyperbole, “Well, at least if a bomb goes off under us while we’re in that, we will only be blown to kingdom come. We won’t die or anything.” He rolled his eyes and fetched Lisbet a spacesuit from a cupboard set inside the floor. “Do you know how to put this on?” he asked as he pulled out the orange and gray suit.

“Uh… no, I’ve never worn one,” she admitted.

He sighed and let his angular body fall slack for a moment before turning his head to face hers. “You have to put it on naked.”

“Because it has a toilet inside it?” she asked hesitantly.

“Yes. It has two modes. The first mode is the one where you aren’t really expecting to have to use a bathroom on your trip because it’s going to be a short one. The second mode is the one where you live in the suit now and you’d better get comfortable. You can wear a diaper in the first mode if you don’t like the process of putting on the suit in the second mode, but it’s pretty uncomfortable because…”

“If you pee or poop, you’ll be sitting in it until you can get somewhere to take the diaper off,” she said, trying her best to match his maturity level.

He nodded.

“What’s the second mode like?”

He grimaced. “It’s pretty uncool if you’re not used to it.” He zipped open the suit and dove down to the crotch area to pull it forward. He pulled out a loop. “So, you take this loop and you use this adhesive strip to attach it to your crotch. If you have any hair down there, you might be lucky and not get the strip on any of it. If you’re unlucky and get some hair caught in the strip, you will be unhappy until the suit comes off.”

“Are you telling me I need to be waxed clean before I can put that on?”

“I’d put you in cryostasis and skip this conversation, except I can’t load your cryochamber onto the land rover with the equipment I have since I cannibalized the Buckshot and I can’t leave you here inside the cryochamber. I just rigged a bomb next to it, and though I do think that if the rocket exploded everything would break except the cryochamber, I think it’s better not to risk it.” His no-nonsense manner sunk into her.

Lisbet wordlessly agreed.

“Look, it doesn’t need to be a pretty wax job,” Beck continued. “I know women have a hard time seeing down there and you’ve been without beauty treatments for months, but the less hair there is, the better the suit will work. Once the seal is in place, you can relieve yourself whenever you want and it will drop into a little baggie that you can drop in the sand without getting any waste on your suit.”

Lisbet stared at him incredulously. “Are you telling me that this suit will put my poop in a doggie bag and we’ll just dump it wherever?”

“Yeah,” he said with an understanding eye roll. “I know on Earth, you guys pick up your dog poop and carry it around in a little bag until you can get to a proper garbage can, but we don’t have landfills or even the microbiology systems that will decompose the poop. There’s no one living on the surface out here and the cleanliness of your suit is more important than where your poop drops. It’s even less important when you consider that I’m going to blow up the surface of the planet.”

Lisbet scratched her forehead and smoothed out her eyebrows. “Okay, is there a kit to help with the hair removal?”

Beck nodded and took her to the bathroom.

“Wait,” Lisbet said, following him in. “Since you’ve been going out in a spacesuit to work on the rocket, does that mean you’re all waxed too?”

“Ah… Do I have to answer that?” he said, handing her a box by the handle. He didn’t answer her question and gave a few instructions before ducking out. “Remember, you don’t have to be smooth as a newborn baby, but the less there is, the better the adhesive will stick and you'll be less likely to get an infection.”

Lisbet chuckled. “And you’re not offering to help me?”

He swung around and gave her a look. “You don’t actually want that.” He closed the door on her and she heard his footsteps leading away from the bathroom.

She opened the kit and got to work.

***

When Lisbet came out of the bathroom, Beck was already in his suit. He handed her the one he had set aside for her. He turned it inside out, gave her specific instructions on how to seal the adhesive strip, and sent her back to the bathroom.

Putting on the suit was like giving her first urine sample, meaning it was the last thing romantic comedies or romance novels had prepared her for. She felt like all the glitter of a main character had come off her and if Beck had been nursing feelings for her they had to be wiped out by the sick reality of how she had to wee in her spacesuit.

“The lack of a bra in this suit is dumb,” she complained loudly as she came out of the bathroom.

“You can wear a bra,” Beck said, jumping up. “Didn’t I say you could wear a bra?”

“No. You didn’t. You said I had to be naked in it.”

“Only naked from the waist down?” he clarified. “Isn’t that what I said?”

Lisbet stuck her tongue out at him and grasped at the closure at the neck.

“Uh… don’t undo it,” Beck said, rushing her. “Refitting the seal will compromise the suit’s integrity. Sorry about not explaining better, but you’re stuck without a bra. It will probably fit better once we go outside and the air in your suit is compressed.”

She didn’t believe him, but there was no point in fighting him. They needed to get back to Noachis.

He helped her with her helmet and then put his on. It was weird watching him put his helmet on. She didn’t like feeling like a child, but she really didn’t know how to do any of the stuff they had to do to go outside on Mars. She felt like a child putting on a snowsuit, while he had been raised on Mars. This was as natural for him as blowing bubbles.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She immediately regretted making the comparison and started picking up the packs of provisions he intended for them to take with them. They were heavy and she realized a moment later that they were mostly taking tech hardware with them. There was one bag of drinks and snacks.

The moment Lisbet felt her boot shift on the sand beneath her, something changed.

On Earth, stepping in sand meant going to the beach. It meant pretending she was plastic and had a perfect life. She went to the beach and wore a bathing suit that made her feel both expensive and beautiful.

When she stepped onto the sand on Mars, a part of her sank further than the sand. A part of her was left behind when she lifted her boot and left a footprint. She stepped away from the person she had been trying so hard to hang onto since she came to Mars. She had tried to keep being her parents’ daughter. It was so subtle, she hadn’t even realized she had been doing it. She had tried to keep the old customs, the old way of doing things.

She realized as Beck cracked open the cargo doors to the land rover that that was the true reason she had forced herself to stay out of Beck’s arms. She was acting like she was still on Earth. She was acting like her parents would be ashamed of her if she ran off with a man seven years younger than her. But now, the life she had had on Earth was gone and she couldn’t get it back. Now, she was on the surface of Mars with only one layer of plexiglass between her and a world that could kill her.

She wasn’t a princess anymore. Or if she was, she was a different kind of princess.

Beck held the passenger door open for Lisbet and she saw him differently than she had before. She had ignored who he really was because who he was didn’t fit into the neat little packages that existed on Earth. He was something else completely.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

She nodded and got in the land rover.

The seat inside was old and worn, which made it softer. Lisbet sank into it as Beck got in the driver’s seat.

“There’s one more thing I forgot to tell you,” Beck said. “I forgot because I haven’t met that many people who have never worn spacesuits. If you want to eat something, you have to eat it as a mush.”

He pulled out one of the snacks and pressed a button at her chin. It made a straw poke from inside her helmet toward her mouth. Beck shoved the mouthpiece of the mush pack and squished it. Apple sauce came up the tube and Lisbet swallowed it.

Lisbet looked at him with curious eyes as he fastened the harnesses around her body. She hadn’t been helped into a vehicle, given a mushy apple snack, and buckled in by an adult since she was a baby. She felt like a baby as he checked to make sure she was okay before he took care of himself.

She groaned inwardly. She was even wearing something very close to a diaper.

Beck set the navigation route on the screen in front of them and they began driving. Lisbet finished her snack and had to follow Beck’s instructions to get the straw inside her helmet to retract.

“I was on a date once where the guy took me to an arcade where they had an interactive Mars experience,” she said slowly.

“How was that?” Beck’s voice came over the speaker in her helmet.

“It’s sort of dumb that being in the simulator was supposed to be a bonding experience.”

“You don’t think you can bond during a simulation?” Beck asked, his voice neutral.

“I felt like I bonded with Vantz when I played Emerald War with him,” she answered softly.

“That was me,” Beck said with only a touch of humor in his voice.

“Of course that was you,” Lisbet replied roughly. “As Vantz, you told me that it was okay for me to sleep with you if I wanted to.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, his helmet facing the rolling pink dunes of the Mars landscape. “If you were from Mars, that would have been all the encouragement you needed. My pressing you any further or even being around you any more than I already was would have been overkill, but you aren’t from Mars… and I misjudged how to handle you.”

“Are you saying you should have accepted my lunch invitation?”

“Sure, but I wish more than that. I wish I’d insisted on helping you take the photos we needed for choosing the outfits you wore to The Boiler Room. I wish I had never bought that mirror. I could have been in the room when you slid in and out of your clothes and we could have bonded over how you looked and how I saw you in each and every outfit. I think my feelings would have gotten through to you then. I could have helped you with hard-to-reach buttons and zippers. And I wish I’d taken you to The Boiler Room every day instead of letting you ride alone.” He was quiet for a moment. “And I wish I told you how lonely I was.”

Lisbet put her hand on his on the gear shift when something happened.

A helocarrier skimmed above them and fired a line of bullets next to the land rover. Sand flew upward and covered the windshield. For a moment, they couldn’t see anything.

He changed modes on the rover and instead of riding on the surface of the sand, they were plowing through it.

Through the back window, Lisbet saw the helocarrier swing around and shoot at them again. This time one of the bullets hit.

Beck checked his instruments. “Damn it. They hit the fuel tank. It’s leaking.” He hit more buttons and they dove further into the sand.

Lisbet didn’t ask why someone was trying to kill them. Almost everyone on Mars who owned a helocarrier would be trying to kill them if that would stop the terraforming project.

The sand Beck drove them into covered their windows and a moment later, it covered the roof of the land rover.

Once they were completely covered by sand, Beck stopped the transport and checked his instruments.

“It’s just circling us,” he said, showing Lisbet the position of the helocarrier over their heads on the screen on the dashboard.

“Does it know where we are?” she asked.

“This image of them flying around is being transmitted to us via satellite, but we’re not on the satellite because we’re underground. They will be able to find us if given a little more time, but they probably know exactly where we are. They’re just not shooting at us because it’s a waste of ammunition when we’re under the sand.”

“What are we going to do?” Lisbet asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.

Beck huffed in annoyance, but it was not the sound of someone who was afraid. It was the sound of someone who was inconvenienced. “We’re going to do the only thing we can do. We’re going to drive under the sand until we get to that cave.” He showed Lisbet the route on the map. “Inside the cave, there’s a place we can hide.”

Lisbet thought that all sounded extremely convenient, even though he was acting put out. She was about to say how lucky they were when she remembered all the maps in Beck’s room. He knew every square inch of Mars. He had privileged information about where they could hide.

He got the land rover moving. It was very slow under the weight of the sand, but it was a vehicle meant for maneuvering through sand and carrying loads from the mines. Beck explained as much as they drove. Not every canal was perfectly clear.

Lisbet kept her eyes on the screen that displayed the helocarrier overhead. It didn’t leave. It just circled the area, looping in wider and wider loops.

Eventually, the land rover shifted. For a moment, Lisbet was afraid the ground under it would give way. There were so many caverns on Mars that they could fall through the surface into a mine shaft if they weren’t lucky.

Beck assured her that they didn’t need to be lucky. He knew the area well. His voice was steady.

Then he pushed the steering wheel down hard and they fell. Not far, but it scared Lisbet and she screamed.

“Stop it,” Beck said over the speaker in her helmet. “We’re fine. We were supposed to fall there. Now we’re in the cave I was aiming for. We just need to follow this for a few caverns and we’ll be at…” he hesitated to continue.

Lisbet turned to look at him. She couldn’t see his expression when his helmet covered so much of the side of his face, but it seemed that he had simply forgotten to keep talking. His driving was taking up all his attention.

They drove deeper into the cave. Lisbet looked out the window, but there wasn’t much to look at. The rover’s headlights lit up what was in the vehicle’s path, but out of the side windows, there was only darkness.

Finally, Beck stopped the rover. “That’s it,” he said, pointing.

“That’s what?” Lisbet asked, straining to see what he saw in the darkness.

“Wait here.” He unbuckled himself and got out of the land rover.

Outside, he approached a wall. It looked like all the other walls. Beck was looking for something on the ground. He moved a few rocks, then he pulled something upward and revealed that the cave wall was fake and what they were looking at was merely a fabric sheet meant to look like the side of the cavern. Once he had tied it up, he revealed a door that looked exactly like a garage door.

Lisbet exhaled in relief. It was exactly what they needed.

He came back to the land rover and drove it in.

“What is this place?” Lisbet asked him.

“You’ll see,” he said sourly as he put the land rover into gear and drove inside.