Presumed Dead (Part 4)

by Rick Kennett

Cy looked into her palm and said, “Mountains?”

Light as a feather atop her head, Lazarus hadn’t twitched a leg for hours. The map in her hand, however, was in motion. By slow degrees all afternoon a series of tiny V shapes, some inverted, all askew, had crept down into view from the top of her palm to inch along towards her little finger.

She shaded her eyes to the west where sunset blazed the sky with banners of red and crimson and orange. It was only now she realized then how much she missed the quiet purple sunsets of Mars. There was something overstated about these dramatic colours.

If there were mountains on the route she had intended then perhaps they were the reason for the detour. Perhaps whatever put the map in her hand was not so capricious after all.
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Presumed Dead (Part 3)

by Rick Kennett

Night came quickly in these latitudes, dropping out of the late afternoon sky like a black weight. Though she thought it silly she didn’t much like the idea of coming across spiders in the dark. Not that she imagined there was a posse after her or that she might be ambushed. But the notion was hard to shake. The spiders were an unknown quantity.

In the lengthening shadow of a capsized hulk she stopped to sniff the air. The hot iron smell of the wreck vied with the scent of rain. A thunderhead was forming in the north. Watching the brewing clouds, for a moment she thought kindly of the dry red of home and its clear pink-brown skies.
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Presumed Dead (Part 2)

by Rick Kennett

Half stumbling, almost tumbling, she made her way down the slope to the plain. The need for shelter and overwhelming curiosity had replaced the urgings of caution.

The first wreck she came to was little more than a collapse of iron plates with only a suggestion of a hull shape. A small steamer with a compact superstructure and squat hull offered a dry but debris-strewn interior. Sections of both sides were crushed in, twisted hull plates making seemingly deliberate spikes of malice within. Cy wanted shelter, but not at the risk of cutting herself in half.

The next wreck was more intact, but too close to a swiftly running stream, which she regarded with a feeling bordering on horror. She was Martian enough to know the constant sight and sound of all that water just flowing away, uncontained, unused, would be too disturbing.
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Presumed Dead (Part 1)

by Rick Kennett

Days later, while sheltering from rain that had lost its novelty, she decided the end had begun when George McClusky said, “So what do you suppose that is?”

That had been the moment. Everything leading up to it may have had a bearing, may have been a primer, but hadn’t been the trigger. Not the utter mental void of floating in space with only the whisper of her rebreather for company. Not when the McMurdo Sound disintegrated around her. Not even the battle itself.

Cy De Gerch slumped against the mushroom big as a tree trunk and closed her eyes to let another dizzy spell pass. The ghost of Jos Manxman would be appearing soon. She knew it. But right now she couldn’t stomach facing the spectre again, arguing with it again.

The rain continued to fall as it’d fallen for days without number, or so it had seemed.
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