Luka walked through Thor Town’s main street with his heart thumping loudly and adrenaline buzzing through his body as he resisted the urge to run. He needed to get to the rover depot as fast as possible, but he needed to do so without attracting attention. If he had been on Earth, he could have gone the back way and hidden in the shadows, but in the small, enclosed development on Mars, there was only the front way through the main street. He kept his head down, trying to look like he wasn’t keeping his head down, and walked as quickly as he could towards the rover depot, hoping he didn’t look like someone who had escaped from custody.
He had used the rover depot many times since taking on Gianni’s old job at Thor Town. It was the only one serving the whole complex and lay at the farthest end of the street where its modest entrance was marked by a simple sign above a normal door.
As Luka approached, he saw there was a second sign dangling from a piece of wire looped over the door handle. Laminated and printed in bright red lettering underneath a ThorGate logo, it read: Rover Access Temporarily Suspended Due to Solar Flare Activity. Underneath, someone had stuck a handwritten note which said: no, we don’t know when it’s going to end, so there’s no point asking.
Erik had mentioned something about a solar flare, but Luka had forgotten about it in his eagerness to escape. He paused. Coming to Mars had already exposed him to more radiation than would have been the case if he had stayed on Earth and minimizing unnecessary exposure had been drilled into him and the other migrants during their journey. But he knew he really didn’t have a choice: a little bit of radiation exposure was preferable to being recaptured.
He tried the door and found it to be open.
Inside was a small area, like a waiting room, with a couple of visitor chairs and an admin desk where Luka would usually discuss his rover booking with a member of staff. But, with rover access suspended, no one was there. Luka’s heart calmed: with a bit of luck, he would be able to take out the rover without having to explain himself.
Beside the desk, an airlock door led to the hangar where all the vehicles were kept and serviced until they were dispatched. Above it, a green light indicated the hangar was fully pressurized. Luka placed his hand on the control and, with relief that access hadn’t been restricted, listened to it respond by firing off a loud but brief warning buzzer. The locks uncoupled and the airlock door moved backwards and sideways on automated arms to allow Luka to step through.
On the other side of the airlock door was a large room full of parked rovers, half of them dusty and the other half clean and pristine white. There were, he counted, ten of them, all parked nose to tail in formation. He hurried down the first row, reading the serial numbers off the sides and looking for the one that matched the booking details on his contraband WristTab. But none of them did.
He tried the hatch of the rover at the end in any case but it was locked and the control panel only responded with a stubborn red light when he tried to access it.
He went around the front of the rover to check the next row and almost ran into a woman coming round the other way. He yelped as his adrenaline surged.
The woman, wearing a set of dusty, denim-blue overalls, merely looked up from the full-sized Tab resting on her arm and regarded him with curiosity. She was young, not even twenty, tall and slim bordering on the underweight, with long dark hair which she had pulled back into a ponytail. “What are you doing here?”
Luka put his hand to his chest as if to slow his heart, pretending that she had merely surprised him, not scared the life out of him. “I didn’t think anyone was about.”
“I heard you come in, but I thought it was someone from maintenance. You know all rovers are off limits until the solar flare’s over?”
“Yes, but I’ve got a booking.” Luka lifted up his WristTab to show her.
“I don’t care if you’ve got a signed letter from the Queen of Sheba, we’re in lockdown.”
“But it’s an emergency.”
“Is your grandmother dying in the hospital at Tharsis City?”
Luka took a moment to process the bizarre question. “No.”
“Then it’s not an emergency.” She turned and walked off between the two rows of rovers, heading towards the reception area.
He rushed after her. “Can you please just look at the booking?”
The dispatcher halted, did an abrupt turn, and frowned. “Name?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure about your own name?”
“A friend booked it. He might have used his name, my name, the company name…” Possibly a false name.
Luka showed her the booking on the WristTab. She peered at it and consulted her own Tab.
As he waited, anxiously, with the sound of his own blood pumping in his ears, he evaluated the slender woman in front of him. If it came to it, he could almost certainly overpower her. He could probably knock her unconscious and carry her out of the hangar before he vented the air if he had to. He prayed it wouldn’t come to that.
She raised her eyebrows at the Tab’s screen. “It seems you’re right, you do have a booking. Erik Bergman, is that right?”
“That’s my friend.” He was surprised that Erik was brazen enough to use his own name.
“And, um… you’re right, it has emergency status which clears you to leave during the solar flare.” She lowered the Tab and looked directly at him. There was genuine concern on her face. “Are you sure you want to go out there?”
She nodded towards the large airlock doors which ran floor to ceiling and were the barrier between the rovers and the planet outside.
Luka looked at them too, the warnings from his training still nagging at the back of his mind. “I’ll be wearing a rad-suit, it’ll give me some protection, won’t it?”
“Rad-suits only protect against normal background radiation.”
“But the rover itself has some shielding?”
“Nowhere near as much as you get in a city.”
“If you combine the protection in the rover and suit…”
“You’re still looking at a dose larger than recommended,” she said. “Especially on top of what you’re exposed to every day living here.”
Luka felt the anxiety twist in his stomach. He didn’t have time for a discussion. He had to leave before anyone realized he was gone. “It doesn’t matter, I need to go. Are you going to check out the rover or am I going to have to take this to a higher authority?”
She paused, thinking. He closed his fingers into a fist and tensed his muscles in preparation.
“Your booking gives you authorization,” she said. “I can’t stop you.”
Luka released his fist and allowed his body to relax a little.
“But, if I were you, I would have a serious think about who you consider to be a friend.”
The dispatcher went back the way she had come, towards the front of the row of vehicles and pointed to the rover at the head of the second row. “This is the one he booked out for you. According to this–” she checked her Tab “–it’s all set to go.”
Luka placed his hand on the control and the hatch opened.
“I presume you know that satellite navigation is unreliable during a solar event?”
“Obviously,” said Luka. Although, in truth, he hadn’t even considered it. “I’ll follow the tracks in the dirt.”
“Just don’t get lost. They can be obscured by dust blowing over them sometimes.”
“I won’t. Thanks.”
Luka stepped inside.
“Can I ask,” said the dispatcher, as he turned around to close it. “What’s the big emergency?”
“It’s about getting justice,” said Luka.
She didn’t look impressed. “Well, good luck with that. I’ll go open the airlock.”
Luka watched her walk back down the row of vehicles and closed the airtight hatchway behind him. At the sound of sealing himself inside, he relaxed a little more. In only a few more minutes, he would be out of Thor Town and heading for Tharsis City. He needed to explain what he had discovered to the one person who would understand: Julie Outerbridge.