Red Desert - Point of No Return

Red Desert –
Point of No Return

Rita Carla Francesca
Monticelli

Copyright 2014 Rita
Carla Francesca Monticelli

Smashwords Edition

Book One of the “Red Desert” Series

Table of
Contents

Point of No Return

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next?

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Acknowledgements

Bibliography

More books by Rita Carla Francesca
Monticelli

About the author

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Copyright and disclaimer

RED DESERT

Book 1

Point of No
Return

Original title:
Deserto rosso - Punto di non ritorno

© 2012 Rita
Carla Francesca Monticelli

Translation by:
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli (© 2014)

Translation
revised by: Martina Munzittu, Richard J. Galloway, and Julia
Gibbs

Cover: © 2014
Alberto Casu
and Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

Important note to the
reader
: This book is
written in British English.

I closed the airlock
door with a quiet thud and I locked it, knowing it might have been
for the last time. Outside it was still dark, just before dawn. The
instant the sun peeked out over the horizon its pale light would
hit the plains, creating long shadows.

I stood for a moment
looking at the stars through the glass, while the valves let out
some air to equalise the pressure with the outside. My suit, which
at first almost adhered to my body, was now expanding, giving me a
clumsy look.

The pressure balance
was reached and the exit door opened. Even though the suit was
heated, I perceived a huge difference in temperature. It could rise
well above ten degrees Celsius on a summer’s day, but it could drop
to minus ninety at night. And the hours before dawn were always the
coldest.

I switched on the
torch and went out, moving with caution. I hoped nobody had seen me
leave. Robert was lost in dreamland and had certainly no intention
of getting up at dawn, but Hassan, in spite of all that had
happened, carried on with the mission, especially now that he was
in charge.

He kept repeating that
in a few months more personnel and materials would arrive. I was
not convinced. Yet another major failure was looming and, at the
moment of need, those in Houston would come out with another
excuse.

Despite the heavy load
I was carrying, I walked with ease. With gravity a little more than
one third of Earth, everything was lighter, and thanks to my
experience over the years I was accustomed to moving with skill on
a rough terrain, even when wearing that uncomfortable suit.

I opened the hatchback
of a rover and loaded my provisions; then I climbed into the front
of the vehicle and activated the pressurisation. The life support
pumps pushed the gasses inside, creating the correct mixture for
breathing. When the green light came up on the dashboard,
indicating the process was complete, I removed my helmet and suit.
I laid them in the back, settled myself in the driving seat and
fastened the seatbelt. As soon as the engine started, an alarm
would go off inside the station, alerting them to the unexpected
activation of one of the two rovers.

There was still time
to go back. I just had to don my suit again, return to my quarters
and climb back into bed. Nobody would notice. But, even if my act
might appear senseless, to me it seemed the most reasonable thing
to do. There was nothing more for me in the station, beside pure
survival. Perhaps not even that certainty.

I studied the data
gathered the evening before on the on-board computer screen. It
wasn’t much, but it was all I had. I took a deep breath, and then
turned on the engine and put my foot down. I was moving towards
another certainty: that of my death. But I had started doing that a
long time earlier, when I accepted the invitation to join the
mission.

“Twenty-nine minutes
to the point of no return.”

The synthesised voice
of the on-board computer sounds again inside the rover. In about
half an hour I will pass the point of no return. The oxygen tank,
together with the carbon dioxide filters, provides breathable air
for one person for a maximum of fifty hours, and I’m about to pass
the twenty-fifth, this means that I won’t have enough to come back
to Station Alpha.

Not that I care, at
this stage.

I try to figure out
how to stop the alarm from beeping every minute, and wonder why
rovers aren’t equipped with an oxygen production system like the
one in the station. The chemical plant extracts this gas from the
carbon dioxide-rich air of Mars, releasing carbon monoxide outside
as waste gas. Why am I thinking this nonsense? Such an apparatus
would occupy too much space, reducing that available inside the
vehicle and making it even slower; it would also require excessive
energy.

The main feature of
these rovers is their agility, to the detriment of the operating
range. On the one hand, fifty hours seemed a sufficient amount of
time for any sortie we had to make in that first stage of our
mission. But actually, they reduced our chances of extending the
area of the planet we could explore. For people like us, with an
average age of thirty-five, who had to spend the rest of their
lives on Mars and who had nothing else with which to occupy their
time, it was a huge limitation.

It’s true that Mars’s
diameter is about half of the Earth’s, but the lack of oceans makes
the explorable surface comparable to the sum of all lands above sea
level of our planet. Hence plenty of places to visit, and even if
at first sight they may seem monotonous with all that dark red,
they hide countless wonders. And we chose to be the first
colonisers of this new world to observe them in person.

In over one thousand
days in the Lunae Planum, we scoured most of the area surrounding
the station within a radius of a little more than three hundred
kilometres. It’s quite impractical to go any further with a vehicle
that can hardly reach twenty-five kilometres per hour, but most of
time travels much slower, especially considering that each sortie
requires at least two persons, for safety reasons. Since there
wasn’t any particular hurry, NASA provided us with the minimum
equipment needed to carry out a series of scientific
investigations, which requires long periods of time and has brought
rather inconclusive results. Beside the geological studies, our
main mission is to find proof of a past life on the planet, though
I’m referring to very simple forms, like bacteria, which would
demonstrate that Earth isn’t unique in the solar system in this
context.

In the first nine
hundred and ninety-five days we were not lucky; we hoped to receive
new material from NASA in order to perform more accurate studies
and maybe push ourselves a bit further. Actually it should have
already arrived three hundred days ago, but a series of technical,
and most of all political, problems delayed its launch. Now we are
waiting for a new launch window, which occurs approximately every
two of Earth’s years, corresponding to one Martian year. This
setback hasn’t had a good impact on the group’s mood, already
affected by the prolonged forced cohabitation. However, we couldn’t
imagine what happened next.

I am able to switch
off that annoying alarm, at last. I have a bigger margin, thanks to
my suit’s endurance, which is about ten hours. This gives me a
certain degree of self-confidence, at least for now. I still have
the means to go back, so for the next four hours I’m just going to
enjoy the journey.

I’m postponing the
inevitable. I have no intention of going back.

The landscape over the
past day has been too repetitive, a single, immense, red desert of
stones and dust, but I can make out some changes in the horizon
now. I smile at the sight. According to the on-board navigator I’m
reaching Ophir Chasma, the first one of a group of formations that
constitutes Valles Marineris, the most complex canyon in the solar
system.

If a person on Earth
must see the Grand Canyon at least once in a lifetime, a person on
Mars cannot miss Valles Marineris!

I’ve read so much
about this place since I was a child and it was one of the main
reasons why I decided to be part of this mission. I can’t die on
this isolated planet without seeing it first. And if I had stayed
at the station, I would no doubt have died. At least this way, if
it has to happen, I will be the one to decide when. In thirty-five
hours, if the suit’s reservoir is full.

Since I left I had no
time to check it. The rover had been prepared for a sortie before,
which was postponed indefinitely. I counted on that, when I
abandoned the station, but I was in such a hurry that I only
thought of bringing some food and water. I put the suit on and went
out without thinking about it too much. I didn’t want to risk
changing my mind.

Since the deaths of
Dennis and Michelle, while Robert spent almost all his time in an
altered state of mind, only I and Doctor Hassan Qabbani were active
in the station. And I didn’t trust Hassan.

I had always looked at
him with suspicion. I knew it was a prejudice and my opinion about
him was different for a while but then, when Dennis died, I had
started to think he had something to do with his disease, as well
as with what happened to Michelle. I perceived a certain falsity in
his look. I started to stay as far as possible from him. I spent
hours and hours working in the greenhouse and avoided touching the
NASA food portions, because Hassan handled our meals. I preferred
to eat the products I had cultivated with my hands and after a
day’s work I went back to my quarters, always locking my door.

“Anna, what’s going
on? Where are you going?” Hassan’s stirred-up voice said via the
radio, some minutes after I had left the station. I just ignored
him, but he continued for a while. “Whatever you are thinking,
please, come back and let’s talk. If you go on, you’ll die.”
Another suicide would decree the definitive failure of the mission.
That was his only real concern, not my well-being. “I’m coming to
get you!”

Those words sounded
menacing and I switched off the radio in reply, then I disconnected
the transponder. That way he couldn’t keep tracking me, if he lost
sight of me. The station was almost at the edge of the horizon
behind me, when I saw his vehicle moving in my direction. He had
used up some of the time to refuel it, but now he was on his
way.

I stepped on the gas.
The flat terrain allowed me to travel at maximum speed, but the
same applied to his rover. By moving so fast, I made myself even
more visible from a distance, because I lifted a cloud of dust.
There were no heights to hide me.

The chase went on for
an hour or so, during which time his vehicle seemed to come closer.
I realised he would catch me sooner or later, if he didn’t decide
to stop. But Hassan wasn’t the kind of person who gave up.

When I had left, the
air was quite clear and the sky was clear, but as I penetrated the
planum the wind became stronger, raising the thin dust that covered
the terrain everywhere. Soon I was facing a dense cloud, made even
darker by the poor light at that time of the day. I decided not to
turn on the headlights, but to stop and let the dust envelop me.
This way I would disappear from Hassan’s sight. Perhaps he would
decide against following me in the storm.

The atmosphere was
charged with static electricity and from time to time I glimpsed a
flash. I would have been scared in normal conditions. The storm
might have lasted for hours, halting my progress. I was in the
widest of the plains, but it wasn’t free of obstacles. If I had
gone on blindly, I would’ve risked damaging the rover and ending
this last journey well before its time.

I took the opportunity
to eat. I had brought with me the quantity of food needed for at
least two and a half days. If I had to die, I resolved to do it
with a full stomach.

Two hours had passed,
before the visibility improved at last. I turned on the engine
again and started to move forward. There was no trace of Hassan
behind me. I found myself hoping he’d had an accident while
attempting to reach me, but I knew him well enough to know he had
gone back to safety. Whatever his intention was, it couldn’t rival
his instinct for self-preservation. With a sigh loaded with fatigue
I tried to dispel that hint of malice, the result of my anger, but
the truth was that I needed to go on, to avoid the temptation of
giving up.