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  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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  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 syst
em.

  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.

  While travelling and admiring the landscape surrounding me, more than once I fancied taking some pictures but realised how silly that was. I should wait to overtake the area we already knew and then send some images to Earth, to let people admire from close up places that no human eye had ever seen directly before. I wanted to share my experience in the best way, because it might have been the last time.

  A camera installed on the top of my rover was recording my entire route, but I doubted anyone would go out of their way to recover the footage from this vehicle. I didn’t want to send it in real time. I wanted to keep those moments for myself, at least as long as I was still here to live them.

  At that point Hassan would have contacted Houston to tell them about my escape. I hoped they would suspect him. The fact that, in a handful of days, one person had died of cancer, another one had committed suicide and a third one had fled to die somewhere in the Martian desert, wouldn’t give a good impression of him and Robert, the last survivors. Especially considering that Robert had stopped communicating with Earth; how could they know he was still alive?

  I smirked at myself with naughtiness. I felt a kind of hatred for Hassan, because he reminded me of my father.

  He got my mother pregnant, when she was a little more than a girl, and then he fled to his country, back to his official fiancée. I’d never heard anything from the man, even after my mother died. He had erased me, and for a long time I had done the same. For some years I’d even dyed my hair blonde, started using coloured contact lenses, and had done my best to avoid getting tanned, so that my skin remained snowy and didn’t reveal my Middle-Eastern blood.

  It was useless, because the features of my face betrayed my origins, as well as my stature. Not that this had any importance in a multicultural city like Stockholm. And so, once I’d completed my studies at university, I decided to be myself again. I understood that what defined me wasn’t my appearance, but what was inside my heart and inside my head.

  Perhaps that was what I should have feared more than everything else.

  I was walking in the snow. The pathway was deserted and lit by a few street lamps. Wrapped in a large padded jacket which almost reached my feet and with a furry hood and a big scarf, I might have been anybody, even a man. I was in no hurry, checking my direction on my mobile phone from time to time to be sure it was the right one.

  A low humming reached me. From a distance I could see a club lit by a big sign. Someone was entering, but when they closed the door the noise ceased. I walked over and mixed in with a group of other local people. My knowledge of German dated back to school and I hoped nobody would talk to me.

  I kept my eyes down until I was inside. A sudden heat hit me. Everybody was dancing and drinking beer. A band was playing on stage, but the most impressive thing was the cacophony of voices and laughter produced by that mass of people.

  I started crossing the crowd with caution. A man, he was twice the size of me, leapt out with a jug in his hand and said something. In such an uproar I couldn’t hear his words, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have understood them anyway. I smiled and shook my head, hoping that might be enough. He smiled back and stepped aside, turning his attention to the woman behind me.

  The throng was such that it took a few minutes to cross the hall and reach the door that connected the club to the small hotel located upstairs. Nobody was on the front desk at that time. All the guests had their own key to open the main entrance of the building, so that they could go in and out, night and day as they wished.

  I looked around, searching for a place where I wouldn’t be spotted, from where I could watch the guests’ comings and goings. The person I was looking for was maybe in the club now, but he might already be in his room and I didn’
t know which one it was. Perhaps I could find out.

  I approached the desk in a cagey manner and leaned over to see whether the computer was on. A screensaver with the classic star field was on the display. Maybe I had been lucky.

  I reached out to touch the mouse, but heard some voices behind me. I withdrew my hand just in time before a young couple entered the lobby. They laughed, while walking in an embrace. Their cheeks were red because of the cold and the alcohol. Having seen me there, standing at the desk, they stopped and scrutinised me. I pulled out my mobile phone and pretended to check my messages, so they resumed laughing and aimed for the stairs, taking leave with a “Gute Nacht!”

  I repeated the same words with an absent minded tone, and pricked up my ears as I listened to their steps climbing to the upper floor, then onto the corridor. The electronic key was inserted in the lock, the door opened and then slammed. In a jiffy there was silence again.

  Once I’d stowed my mobile phone, I turned back to the desk and this time I reached the mouse. As I touched it the screensaver disappeared, leaving in its place a box for entering a password.

  “Shit.” It couldn’t be so easy.

  I put aside any caution, went to the other side of the desk and moved closer to a panel hanging on the wall, with small post boxes for each hotel room. Just few of them were empty. The boxes contained small envelopes, all identical. What was inside them? I started to check them one by one, hoping they bore the recipient’s name, but nothing was written on them and they were all sealed. I turned my attention to the piece of furniture again. Guests were asked to sign a form at check-in and those sheets should be somewhere. I crouched down and I opened the cupboard doors. There were all sorts of things in it: yellowing paper reams, an old computer keyboard, cables of various sizes and shapes, but no register or archive. They had to be using an electronic one. In spite of the provincial look of the place, they hadn’t closed themselves off from technology.