Chapter Text
Carmilla checked the stats monitor on her forearm, her eyes scanning the different numbers as they fluctuated for half a minute before finally settling. Around her, the red of the planet sat still, the sound of her breathing inside the helmet giving the stillness an eerie sense of life.
“Karnstein?” the voice came in through her helmet speakers, not as clear as she’d like, but it’d do.
“All good.” She held a thumbs up high in the air, high enough that the various cameras perched on top of the base behind her could pick it up.
It seemed like everything at Base Hermes ‘would do’. Hermes was a way station for ground travel between the Zeus and Athena bases, a place where personnel could stop over for food, rest, and to get their Rovers checked over. Everything was transient at Hermes, well, everything except for the small team that had been stationed there.
Carmilla walked over to the solar panel that had started glitching, looking over it carefully to try and find what had caused the slightly lower than normal output. It wasn’t anything serious, but at Hermes even the smallest of things were investigated. It wasn’t out of diligence - it was out of boredom.
As the Rover technology had improved over the years since the colonisation of Mars, the need for a way station lessened. It left Base Hermes feeling like a forgotten petrol station by an old, rarely used highway.
Coming out to check on the solar panels provided some respite from kicking around the workshop while avoiding the lovelorn sighs of their mechanic, Kirsch, which were directed at the Base Commander, Lawrence. He’d been assigned to Hermes a few months ago after finishing his qualifications, and Carmilla had to be present for the disgustingly high school process of him prodding at the Commander like a child, testing her boundaries, and then becoming enamoured with her strength and authority.
Carmilla had chased after the Mars program because of the chance to explore the universe, to push the boundaries of human knowledge and reach, but she’d also done it to get away from people.
At Hermes, she had been stuffed into a sardine can with them. She’d had to endure them for most waking moments of her day, in her space, asking her things, talking to her, expecting her to reply.
She ran a gloved hand over the bottom of the panel, examining the tech as closely as she could through the grimy visor of her helmet. The tip of her thumb caught along an inconsistency, and she sighed.
Easy fix, damn it. Last time she’d gotten to travel to the absurdly well-stocked Base Zeus for a part, but this wouldn’t take much more than some buffing and electrical tape for good measure.
“Yo, bro, how’s it looking?” Kirsch’s voice came over her comms and she rolled her eyes, wondering who had given him the microphone.
Despite his frat bro persona, she had a grudging respect for the mechanic, whose annoying chatter about tech would sometimes offer insightful ideas. If he didn’t come off as such a dumbass he might have even been posted to Athena, where they were constantly making technological advances that left Hermes in empty red dust.
“Dude?” he asked again.
Carmilla sighed; he was the type who didn’t consider silence an answer. “It’s fine, just gunked up from the last storm.”
“Bummer,” he said, as if he knew how much Carmilla preferred to be working out in the dust bowl to being inside. It was moments like this that she thought she might have underestimated him.
“Oh hey, we’ve got two scientists, coming in hot from the east.” There was a pause and then, said through a smirk, “And they’re pretty hot t-”
Any idea that she had underestimated him immediately disappeared from her mind, as she snapped off her comms. The Commander would have a fit about her closing the line, even though she was only five metres away from the entrance, but she didn’t care.
She straightened up slowly; everything in the space suits had to be done slowly. It wasn’t that they were weighty - even if they were, the low Mars gravity would have countered it - it was just that they were so bulky that it felt like moving while being wrapped in thick foam mats.
As she made her way back to the base, she let her eyes drift over the craggy mountains that towered around them. Hermes was built in the narrowest part of valley, as if desperate to funnel each passer-by towards them.
Without forest or animals or anything else vaguely Earth-like, the mountains around them stood tall, bare and eternal. Something about the eroded stone felt like pillars to past civilisations, even though they were the first.
She turned her attention to the east mouth of the valley. She could already see the Rover in the distance, sending up streams of smoke and dust as it closed in.
She frowned.
Turning her comms back on, she asked, “How hot are we talking here?”
Kirsch seemed unbothered by her cutting him off, humming and answering, “I don’t know, maybe like nines-”
“The Rover, dumbass.”
“Oh! They fell off a mountain while doing some science, botany, thing. They seemed pretty freaked, but you know scientists.”
She did know scientists. They lived in perfect white, glass rooms and complained if the thermostat was off by a few degrees. They didn’t have ripped space suits patched together with electrical tape, and stats monitors that glitched.
Under ordinary circumstances, she would have gone into the base and made herself scarce. She wasn’t good at meet and greets, that was the job for the ‘morale officer’ (Carmilla despised whoever came up with that job) Perry. Carmilla hadn’t said more than five words to Perry over the past year, but she appreciated the woman’s ability to turn crappy rations into semi-edible food, and her tendency to steer visitors well away from her.
But something didn’t feel right about the way the Rover was screaming across the planet’s surface.
“Patch me in to them.”
Kirsch didn’t reply for a long moment and Carmilla checked her comm system. She was still linked up. She was about to deliver a scathing insult, when Kirsch coughed and asked hesitantly, “You sure? After last time, the Commander said you’re not allowed to-”
“Just do it, numb nuts,” Carmilla snapped.
He muttered something that Carmilla didn’t catch through the static, and then there was a click that signalled she was connected to the scientists’ Rover comms.
“What have you idiots done?”
A stunned silence met her question, before a defensive reply of, “We aren’t idiots.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Carmilla said bluntly. “What happened?”
Another voice, the second scientist, replied, “I was taking some samples from Olympus Mons-”
If Carmilla hadn’t been wearing a bulky space suit, she would have pinched the bridge of her nose.
“-and we were driving up one of the slopes-”
Carmilla groaned.
“-and one of the wheels slipped-”
“Okay,” Carmilla interrupted, “stop, before I have an aneurysm. Get the damn Rover over here, and believe me when I say, you two most certainly are idiots.”
“We are n-”
Carmilla shut off her comms and made her way into the base, feeling like the fury pouring off her might cause the suit to burst into flames if she didn’t get it off now.
When the airlock sealed she ripped the helmet off, a string of curse words pouring out under her breath. It helped a little, but not enough, and when she entered the base the morale officer was standing there with an apprehensive look on her face.
“What?” Carmilla snarled. Word tally for the year rose to six.
“Perhaps you should go to the Mechanics wing?” Perry suggested in a voice half an octave higher than normal.
Carmilla grunted and walked in that direction, pulling off pieces of her suit and letting them drop to the floor as she went. Perry had asked on the scientists’ behalf, but she didn’t have to. There was no other place Carmilla wanted to be right now, and she definitely didn’t want to be anywhere near those idiots when they arrived.
She had just entered the Mechanics wing (‘wing’ was generous, really it just meant the leftmost room of the building) when Kirsch rushed up to her closely followed by Lawrence.
“I’m so sor-” was all the mechanic got through before the Commander interrupted him.
“I thought I told you, no talking to visitors.”
Carmilla scowled. “But I get so very, very lonely.”
She pushed past the two ridiculously tall people, her hand rougher on Kirsch’s shoulder than it was on Lawrence’s. The Commander followed her to the workbench, rounding it on the other side as she tried to trap Carmilla into looking at her.
“You know, when they complain I’m the one who gets my ass handed to me by Control. You think I like getting yelled at about how some super genius got their feelings hurt when you couldn’t keep your mouth shut?”
Carmilla picked up one of the screwdrivers, angrily attacking an air filter she was meant to be taking apart to clean.
Commander Lawrence let out a tired sigh - this was a dance that they’d done a million times over a variety of topics in the three years they’d worked together. “Can you at least nod, or something, so I know you heard me?”
Carmilla’s efforts on the air filter paused, and she lifted her face to Lawrence to raise an eyebrow slowly.
The Commander gave up with a weary, “Good enough,” leaving the wing with her shoulders pulled into a tense line halfway up to her ears.
When the door closed behind her, Kirsch moved into the space she had left across from Carmilla. His expression was tentative, unsure if he could speak without having grievous bodily harm inflicted on him. Carmilla wasn’t sure either.
She felt the hot buzz sweep her body in waves, making her hands tense and relax in an erratic rhythm. It was fuelled by her frustration at the scientists, at being reprimanded like a child, at the Goddamn air filter with the Goddamn worn down screw heads that the tip of the screwdriver kept slipping off of.
She threw the air filter at the opposite wall, but before it could hit it with a satisfying thump, Kirsch snatched it out of the air and grabbed a smaller screwdriver from the table. He worked on the filter for a few seconds and then pulled it apart, putting it in pieces on the bench in front of Carmilla.
Carmilla stared down at the parts before pushing them off the desk with the back of her hand. Kirsch gathered them off the floor and put them back on the desk. Carmilla pushed them back off. Kirsch put them back on. Carmilla pushed them back off.
Kirsch threw the pieces over his shoulder so that they landed on one of the benches along to the wall, skittering along the metal counter.
Carmilla scowled and threw the screwdriver down on the table, snapping her fingers so that her mini Rover - Sojourner, who was about the size of a small dog - followed at her heels as she left the wing.
The layout of Hermes was lengthwise - the entrance airlock lead onto the circular foyer area, which doubled as a communications hub. The Mechanics wing was to the left, through a round metal door with scorch marks on the workshop side, which partly blacked out the circular windows that bordered the top half of it. The dining and kitchen area was to the right of the foyer, and past that was the bathrooms and bunks.
Which meant to get anywhere else in the base, Carmilla had to pass through the foyer. Usually this didn’t bother her, but this time it happened to be at just the time that the scientists were being greeted by Commander Lawrence and Perry.
Carmilla stopped just inside the foyer, and for a moment she seriously considered turning around and walking back into the Mechanics wing, but then one of them spotted her. The short blonde scientist started towards her, finger wagging in a ludicrous manner because she hadn’t taken off her space suit yet (barring the helmet), giving her a portly, uncoordinated look.
“You!” she exclaimed, pressing herself way too far into Carmilla’s personal bubble, finger still waving furiously through the air. “Where do you get off being such a- such a-”
“Laura,” the other scientist with short, fiery hair pleaded with her. They looked like they’d already suffered a long rant by the tiny blonde, and for a moment Carmilla almost felt sorry for them.
“Do you need me to wait here while you come up with something or can I be dismissed?” Carmilla asked through gritted teeth. Sure, there was humour in the fact that the miniature scientist was trying to admonish her, but the Commander’s eyes were hard on her, keeping her from saying what she wanted to say.
The scientist, Laura, let out a loud sound of fury, her gloved hands bunching into fists as she stomped off, the suit making gentle swishing sounds as she did.
The other scientist with the fiery hair grimaced at them all, as if this was something that happened a lot, and quickly followed Laura.
Carmilla looked at the other two as if to say - who’s going to tell her she just stormed off into a closet? But she lost interest quickly, and headed in the direction of the bunks.
That night, after the sounds of eating and talking had died down in the dining area, Carmilla snuck out of the bunks, unplugging from her music, to finally grab some food. It was normal for her to skip eating with the rest of the base, and Perry usually left something in the small fridge for her. Tonight was no exception, and Carmilla took a large bite out of the wrap as she sat down at the table.
Even though there weren’t many people at the base, it was easy to make the space feel full, and Carmilla revelled in these moments when everyone else had retired to their bunks and she’d sit in the dim half-light, letting herself explore ideas for inventions that would make the harsh land of Mars just a little bit more habitable.
The door to the dining area opened and Carmilla tensed, her grip on the wrap turning strangling for a moment.
The scientist, Laura, stared at her from the doorway. “Oh.” Laura looked just as disappointed at seeing Carmilla, as Carmilla was at seeing her.
Laura hesitated, and Carmilla could see her weigh up her options. Finally, she decided to enter, and they both slumped in the other’s presence.
“I didn’t know anyone would be here,” Laura said, as if an explanation was needed.
“Well, there is.”
Laura froze at the coldness in Carmilla’s voice, and a scowl appeared on her face as she went to the fridge, but she didn’t reply. She started to go through the fridge, moving aside a jug of beer Kirsch had brewed to take another wrap out. Carmilla eyed the wrap, comparing it to the one in her hands, before her lips pulled into a thin line and she put it down on the plastic tray.
Laura sat down at the other end of the table, very specifically not looking in Carmilla’s direction. Then, she very quickly spun around and blurted, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“Okay,” Carmilla said slowly, rolling the ‘o’ around in her mouth before letting it drop out.
“Aren’t you going to apologise for being super rude?” Laura demanded, her expression all righteous and expectant.
“Did you apologise to me just so I would apologise to you?”
Laura startled at that, her eyes widening, then narrowing, and finally turning away from Carmilla and shoving a huge bite of the wrap into her mouth.
The silence filled the room between them, but Carmilla was only focused on the wrap in front of her and weighing up her hunger.
“We didn’t mean to damage the Rover.”
Carmilla sighed and pushed the plastic tray away from her.
“At Athena there’s a huge pressure to keep making new discoveries, to ‘push the boundaries of science’,” Laura said in a hollow, deep voice that was obviously her trying to imitate someone. “We knew there was something on Olympus Mons, and we had to-”
“Do you know what the black zone is?” Carmilla asked, not forcefully, but frankly enough that Laura looked contrite.
Carmilla waited for an answer and eventually Laura mumbled, “It’s where you’re not meant to go.”
“Right. And what is Olympus Mons classified as under the MSE Code?”
“A black zone,” Laura replied, staring down at her hands as if she was a very small child being yelled at by an adult.
Carmilla made a sound in the back of her throat, standing up from the table and throwing the wrap out, before heading to the Mechanics wing. She heard Laura stand and start to follow her, and wow she had not missed having scientists around.
“I just, I know that I wasn’t meant to be there, and that was totally my bad, but I think that you should admit that maybe there’s something wrong with the system in place, you know.”
Carmilla cut through the foyer easily in the dark. The stumble and sound of a wheeled chair skating across the floor proved that Laura hadn’t managed to do it so easily.
“Why are you so desperate to not be at fault, poindexter?”
“I’m not!” Laura protested hotly. As Carmilla waited for the Mechanics door to open, Laura caught up with her, and slipped into the wing behind her. “There’s just a larger picture.”
Carmilla swiped her hand across the light control, so that the lights flickered on in the wing. In the centre of the floor space sat the scarred, dented wreck of the scientists’ Rover that had been brought in through the side exit. Sojourner came to life in the corner and scooted over to her with a whir. She leaned down to bump the top of his casing with her hand, forgetting for a moment that Laura was next to her, until she felt her eyes watching her. Carmilla felt a sudden hot flash of shame, as though the scientist had seen her naked, but in a way that had nothing to do with her body.
“You have a mini Rover?” Laura asked, watching Sojourner dash around the workshop. Mini Rovers hadn’t been used since early Mars exploration, Sojourner was named after the first. Carmilla had repurposed what had been classified as a relic, fitted him out with new parts, a new design, and new programming, and now he was the only functioning one outside of a museum.
Ignoring Laura, Carmilla gathered her tools off the evenly spread hooks bolted to the walls and dumped them on the floor next to the scientists’ Rover, causing Sojourner to scoot quickly out of the way. She went to the pneumatic jack by the wall and wheeled it over. The jack was a simple looking piece of equipment, with three metal prongs that hovered above the ground and joined at a long triangular base, which had a red and green button, and a metal handle to move it.
She positioned the prongs evenly under the Rover and stomped on the green button with her toe. It took a moment, buckling slightly under the weight with a hiss, but the Rover slowly started to lift. When it was high enough she hit her heel against the green button and kicked over a creeper, the rubber wheels skidding jerkily across the composite plastic floor, before lying down on it, and pushing herself under the body of the Rover.
“Anyway,” Laura said, “I figured since we’re going to be here for a while, we should make peace. Put our first impressions behind us.”
Under the Rover, Carmilla mimed gagging.
“You know?” Laura asked after a long beat.
Instead of replying, Carmilla examined the state of the Rover’s belly. “Wrench 4B.”
Carmilla saw Laura’s feet do an awkward shuffle so she could look at the tools next to her, as if she’d be able to recognise 4B on sight. Carmilla rolled her eyes. “Not you.”
“Oh, I-”
Sojourner went over to the spread of tools, searching the ID chips embedded in each handle, before finding 4B and picking it up with a magnetised prod. He brought it to Carmilla and after she'd pried it free, he bumped the nose of his casing against her fist. (It was a behaviour that Kirsch had taught him - and one she’d never forgive him for.)
She worked at the bolts of the mangled buckling, each revolution scraping the wrench against the metal, until she could finally pull it free. It dropped to the floor with a thick clunk, and she reached deeper into the engine to see how much internal damage had been wrought.
“I thought you were the engineer.”
Carmilla wasn’t sure if she was more surprised that the scientist had stuck around, or annoyed. Those two emotions were definitely in the mix.
“Mechanical engineer. I helped design this model.”
“Oh my God,” Laura said, as if a puzzle piece had just slid into place and it made Carmilla shift in discomfort. “You’re Carmilla.”
Before Carmilla could get out some cutting comment, which probably would have included a patronising pet name, Laura continued, “I work with Ell! Well, not with, but she works in the lab next to-”
“Get out.”
There was a pause. “I-”
“Get the fuck out.”
She watched Laura’s feet hesitate before they left the room and the door closed behind her. Her hands shook so hard that the wrench clattered to the floor and she had to grip onto the belly of the Rover to try and ground herself.
---
Laura walked into the foyer and Carmilla stood to walk out. It had been like this for the last three days. Carmilla did her best to avoid her altogether but it was a small base and running into each other was a certainty. She considered making up reasons to spend her time outside, but the quicker she helped Kirsch fix the Rover the sooner the scientists could leave, so she just chose to silently walk out of the room whenever Laura walked in. Part of her whispered that Laura would go back and tell Ell and they’d laugh over how pathetic it all was, but whatever.
Laura crossed the room quickly and blocked her exit, a defiant look painted across her face. Carmilla briefly considered running out the airlock and letting Mars’ atmosphere do what it would.
“I don’t like Ell.”
Carmilla’s curiosity won out over her wish to escape. For the moment.
“I’m sorry I brought her up, I wasn’t thinking. It’s just... I’ve heard about you. Not from her, I mean I’ve never talked to her, but-” Laura stopped herself. “I heard about what happened.”
Carmilla’s urge to run outside grew tenfold.
“You were amazing,” Laura said without a single trace of irony. She stated it as if it was an undisputed fact, like Earth’s gravity being just over two and a half times stronger than Mars’, or there being 4.7 litres of blood in the average human body. She said it as if the statement stood on it own, like it didn’t need any evidence or proof, it just was.
The ‘were’ stuck in Carmilla’s throat. The past tense felt like an itchy bandage over a tender wound, and even more so because she knew it was right. She knew that running away from a bad break up to the most isolated, backwater place on the entire red planet had changed the ‘are’ to ‘were’.
Laura’s eyes dropped to Sojourner, who was doing lazy donuts through the foyer. “Are.”
Again, Carmilla felt the urge to throw herself, bare and vulnerable, onto the surface of Mars again, but this time it was for a completely different reason.
---
“Good morning!”
Laura hopped onto the counter of the workshop and slid a mug of coffee Carmilla’s way. Carmilla was wearing the magnifying glasses she’d crafted from a pair of Kirsch’s old lenses and parts she’d cannibalised from a microscope. They didn’t look as clean as the surgical ones, but they did their job well. When she looked in Laura’s direction, Laura shielded her eyes from the powerful torchlight perched on the top of the frames.
Carmilla switched the torch off and took a generous sip of the coffee. It tasted like dirt, but Perry knew how to make it taste like nice dirt at least. She took the glasses off, dropping them onto the counter, and examined Laura suspiciously. “Why are you so chipper?”
“The sun is out, 80% of the samples we took are viable, what isn’t there to be chipper about?”
Carmilla pushed the part she had been working on closer to Laura, who examined it as if she would have some idea of what it meant. Both of them knew she wouldn’t, but Carmilla still offered it and Laura still looked.
“What am I looking at?”
“Something that needs replacing.”
Laura grimaced sheepishly. “Oh.”
Carmilla leaned back in the chair, stretching out her spine, and rubbing her eyes with the meaty part of her palms, sending veins of colours shooting across the back of her eyelids. It might be morning to Laura, but Carmilla hadn’t slept yet and her eyes were going blurry from focusing through the glasses for so long.
“You’re lucky you kept 80% of the samples viable with this thing.”
The part, although small, was crucial for the vacuum-sealed part of the Rover’s storage compartment, keeping any scientific samples in the exact right atmosphere. It had been one of the main things Carmilla had worked on, and it was what set this Rover apart from the others.
“I may have fiddled with some of the environmental controls from my suit and kept them in there,” Laura admitted.
Despite herself, Carmilla was impressed, and it must have shown on her face because Laura smiled back uncomfortably, shifting out from under the engineer’s gaze and hopping off the counter. “So, are you headed to Zeus?”
Carmilla’s eyes followed Laura as the scientist wandered around the workshop, poking at the different Rover parts that had been laid bare for them to work on. “Looks like it.”
Laura picked up the soldering iron, playing with it and making a stream of smoke rise from the tip before quickly putting it back on the table. “Do you,” she started slowly, drawing out the syllables, and then asked the rest of the question in one breath, “think that I could come?”
“You want to come to Zeus?”
“I’ve never been.”
Carmilla considered her before finally nodding. “Alright.” Laura started to celebrate, but Carmilla held her pointer finger up in front of Laura’s face. “But I have some rules.”
---
Laura eyed the Hermes Rover control panel suspiciously. It had several wires hanging out of it, which had been messily wrapped in electrical tape. “Are you sure this is safe?”
“Sure,” Carmilla replied. She glanced at Laura out of the corner of her eye. “Mostly.”
“Mostly?” Laura echoed, her voice rising several notes as her voice box tightened.
Carmilla smirked to herself. This was so easy, it almost took the fun out of it. Almost.
Laura was manically clutching her tablet to her chest, as if the piece of technology would protect her if the Rover suddenly broke down around them.
Carmilla spotted a rock the size of an exercise ball ahead of them and veered the Rover towards it as subtly as she could. Laura didn’t notice, her attention was still fixed on the control panel, like a guard dog obsessively watching the front door. The rock hit the front bumper with a loud crack, causing the entire Rover to shudder, and Laura jumped in her seat, scrambling to grip onto the seat belt and hug the tablet tighter.
The rock gave way easily to the bumper, crumbling under the protective guard Kirsch had built, and Carmilla couldn’t help but laugh at the breathlessly panicked way Laura’s eyes darted around them.
Carmilla’s laughter was like a cold bucket of water to Laura’s panic, and she shoved the still snickering engineer in the shoulder. “Not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
Laura shoved her again and Carmilla held up her pointer finger. “Hey, no shoving the driver.”
The scientist rolled her eyes, but dropped her hand. “How long until we get there?”
“Well, we’ve been driving for fifteen minutes, so, four hours and forty-five minutes. By the way,” Carmilla reminded her, “you only get to ask that two more times.”
“I know,” Laura replied sulkily, even though she had clearly forgotten.
They still had another ten minutes before they were free of the mountain range, and Carmilla snuck glances over to the scientist as she finally managed to relax. The shock seemed to have shaken free her tension, letting her take in their surroundings, and she was staring up at the craggy mountain faces with an open-faced wonder.
Carmilla could remember when she felt like that, although she doubted her emotions had been so naked on her face.
“When did you ship here?”
Laura startled at Carmilla’s voice, too caught up in the mountains, and for a moment Carmilla was surprised too. She certainly hadn’t thought the question through before she’d asked it, but upon seeing Laura’s reaction she realised how weird it was that she’d asked it.
“The fourth phase,” Laura replied, her eyes going back to climbing the ridges as soon as she’d answered, hungry to drink in more of the landscape.
The fourth phase had happened five years ago, and consisted of mostly botanists and environmental engineers - trying to find new ways to utilise Mars’ water and soil to grow plants. Carmilla had come with the third phase, which was two years prior to that. If Laura had come in the fourth phase then it was no surprise that she hadn’t been to Zeus before. By then all the different bases had been established as very separate.
Carmilla expected Laura to ask which phase she’d been, so she was caught off guard when Laura instead asked, “Has anyone ever sampled these mountains?”
Carmilla shook her head. “Black zone.”
Laura made a small sound in the back of her throat, but it was little more than her just acknowledging that she’d heard Carmilla. After a long beat, she turned to her. “Can you stop the Rover? I need to test something.”
Carmilla checked the charge on the Rover. “Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes,” Laura promised.
Carmilla sighed and put the Rover into park. They both put on their helmets and Laura’s feet danced in place as Carmilla let out the pressure from the Rover and opened the hatch. Laura scrambled out of the Rover, yanking herself through the top hatch and almost slipping in her eagerness to get outside.
As Laura jumped to the ground Carmilla stood on the chairs, straddling the space between them to lift her head out of the hatch. She crossed her arms over the roof, watching the scientist as she walked as quickly as she could to the mountain walls. In the suit she looked like she was waddling, each step over-correcting so that she wouldn’t have to worry about falling.
When Laura finally reached the rock walls, she held up her tablet and set to work. Carmilla continued to stand there for another minute before getting bored and dropping back into her seat to drum out a rhythm on the steering wheel.
Fifteen minutes later, Laura got back into the Rover with a wild, excited look in her eyes.
Carmilla recognised the look, she’d seen it on Ell’s face every time she’d discovered something or made some sort of break through. The words that Carmilla had always said to the look felt like a hard lump in her throat, each letter scraping the inside of her oesophagus, digging into her as she swallowed and re-sealed the Rover.
The second Laura’s helmet was off she started talking about the rock face; what she’d found, and what it meant. Carmilla was slower to take off her helmet, lost in the sickening familiarity that had pooled at the bottom of her stomach. She became semi-aware of the fact that Laura had stopped speaking, and turned to her, trying to shove her thoughts down so they didn’t show in her eyes.
The expectant look Laura was giving her made Carmilla ask, “What?”
Something left Laura’s eye, some glimmer, and Carmilla was relieved to see it go, but she also wanted to chase it back, to return it to Laura’s eyes.
When Laura finally spoke she mumbled, “Nothing.”
For the rest of the trip to Zeus, Laura watched the terrain pass them by, while Carmilla stared at the skyline.
---
Base Zeus rose like a monster on the horizon, a hulking building that shone against the dirt surroundings. The outside of it was covered in a reinforced polyethylene sheeting, which was an opaque pearl colour that shimmered in the light. It almost made it look like a mirage, but the sharp glint of steel solidified the image, a firm skeletal structure woven through the pearly sheeting. The exterior sheet moved with the wind, buffeting out or pulling gaunt against the frame.
The main part of the base was a large dome, which was far wider than it was tall, and around the rim of the dome there were several different sections that linked out, some were small circular hubs, while others were long rectangular ones reaching out like roots along the ground. The hospital was the longest protruding section; it sat parallel to the horizon when driving from Hermes, and the outside had long been stained a rusty colour.
She still remembered the taste of the hospital air. It was the closest thing on this planet to Earth air, carefully concocted in a laboratory as all things here were. There was some reasoning behind it, it had been explained to her, but she hadn’t been able to listen, distracted by the person in the next bed over who was crying.
“Wow,” Laura breathed out as she stared at Zeus.
The broad building usually had that effect on people. While Athena took advantage of its surroundings, Zeus was built on a flat plain, so it dominated the landscape. It was the second permanent structure to be built on Mars (the first being Hera), and by far the largest. What the exterior didn’t show, however, was how deep into the ground it went.
As they approached, the mouth of the building came into focus. It was a long sliding airlock, wide enough to fit four Rovers side-by-side, but only 2 metres tall. Still, the width was somehow more intimidating than if it had been tall, Carmilla let the Rover idle as she patched into the comms system.
“Knock, knock.”
“Clearance,” the reply came, completely empty of humour.
“Omega Epsilon Sigma.”
There was a pause and then the doors opened. When there was enough room for the Rover to slip through, Carmilla jumped it forward and the doors closed behind them, sealing them into the base.
---
Three years ago
The entrance bay was a large grey room, one of the only ones with a paved floor, because of the Rovers. There was a fleet of them to the side, Zeus’ exploration Rovers, plus the few visitors from other bases. Usually the job was stressful, there was a high degree of traffic to coordinate, and you were dealing with everyone from the highest Command officers, to other techies.
Right now, it was dead quiet. They were experiencing one of the worst storms since colonisation, which meant that the two door techs on duty were stuck with nothing to do. But two of them still had to be scheduled for some stupid bureaucratic reason.
They were seated at their consoles, which were perched on separate platforms two metres away from each other. It was meant to promote efficiency, but it usually resulted in them tossing a rubber ball back and forth when they got bored. Right now, however, the mood between them was far too sour.
It had been Mel’s fault that they were scheduled, she’d drawn the short straw and Theo was her duty partner. She couldn’t blame him for being moody - standing guard over a bunch of Rovers was not a great way to spend what was basically a holiday, given that everyone else was in the central part of the compound on a safety lockdown.
Mel squinted as she stared at the monitors, most of the image was a mess but she picked up the figure amongst the blur of dust. A person.
“Shit!” She jumped up from her console, using the railing to swing herself around it and land on the garage floor. “Open the airlock!”
Theo frowned at her, his expression a mix of curiosity and fear. “We can’t, the storm hasn’t passed fully yet.”
“It’s passed enough,” she yelled over her shoulder as she ran to the bay doors, “open the goddamn airlock!” She stepped into one of the slim suits they had by the doors. They weren’t designed to withstand much time on the outside, but she didn’t need much. She twisted on her gloves, boots, and paused for a moment over the oxygen tank. Those needed ten minutes to boot up, and would also require a stats monitor.
She grabbed one of the portable oxygen supplies, it was only as big as her fist and would give her fifteen minutes of oxygen, twenty tops, but that was enough. She positioned it over her nose, securing it with the elastic, and pulled on the helmet. With every joint in the suit sealed, she went over to the now partly opened doors and sidestepped through them.
“Seal it,” she said over the comms. With the oxygen supply on her nose it turned her voice nasal, but he did it anyway. The airlock started to adjust the pressure and she refused to let her mind travel as she waited for the green light to flick on next to the outside airlock doors.
Then it did.
---
The inside airlock doors opened and Carmilla eased the Rover through the doors, pulling it over to the marked visitors area. There weren’t any other visitor Rovers, which wasn’t a surprise. Over the years, the bases had established their own self-sufficient systems, plus regular stock runs from Zeus took care of any other issues that came up.
Unless you happened to be stationed at Base Hermes, with its lacklustre storeroom and subpar tech.
Carmilla climbed out of the hatch first, hopping off the Rover’s roof and careful to hide her smile at the door tech that was running from her console to greet her. The one person on Mars that she could somewhat tolerate, she certainly couldn’t make it obvious, or word would spread and people might talk to her even more often than they did now.
When Mel reached her she came to a dead stop, as if she hadn’t just run across the length of the bay, but there was warmth in her dark eyes that she wasn’t quite able to tuck away. A strand of her hair had come loose from her ponytail, the black ringlet twisting next to her face, quirking the otherwise dull look of the grey uniform.
“Karnstein.”
“Callis.”
Instead of embracing, they stood in place, regarding each other, their chins tipped slightly up in a show of dominance.
“Nice to see you arriving in a Rover.”
“Are you going to make that joke every time?”
Laura landed next to Carmilla as Mel replied, “I haven’t decided yet.” Then, her attention snapped to the scientist and she offered her a polite smile, but the width of it made it look like Laura was the one she’d known for years. “Welcome to Zeus, Dr Hollis.”
---
Carmilla walked the aisles of the Zeus stock room assertively, each step echoing through the basement warehouse. She didn’t even seem to be scanning the shelves, just glancing up at them every so often to orientate herself, as she continued to her destination.
Laura and the stock room attendant trailed behind her, Laura trying to take in as much as she could while still keeping up with the engineer, and the attendant hurriedly flicking through the warehouse tablet. “I don’t have a visit scheduled, you aren’t allowed to just come in and take what you want!”
“Actually, that’s exactly what I can do.” Carmilla turned a corner. “I work on Hermes. And our shitty supply stock means that I get to come here, raid your stock, and all you can do is smile, say thank you, and wish me a good day.”
“I-I-” The attendant looked lost for words as he stopped in place, not used to someone dismissing him with such ease.
Carmilla found the section she was looking for. Trust Zeus to never rearrange their supply sections, that combined with her photographic memory meant that she hadn’t needed to consult the attendant at all. The fact that they’d gotten some new person who was unaware of how things worked was a pain in the ass, but Carmilla had gotten fairly good at ignoring pains in her ass.
Her head poked around the corner, to where Laura was comforting the attendant and his hurt feelings. “What’s the code, newbie?”
His shoulders sagged as he replied, “Four seven three eight.”
She put the code into the keypad at the end of the wall of shelving and the shelves started to move, cycling down so that the right shelf was now at chest height to Carmilla. The plastic covering slid back and she picked up the part, pocketing it before locking the shelf again.
When she walked past Laura and the attendant, she threw him a sarcastic smile. “Thank you for all your help.”
Carmilla navigated her way through the stock aisles, not looking at the parts as she passed them. She didn’t need to know everything she was missing, she preferred to work with as little as possible. It made her smart, it sharpened her skills, it forced her to be excellent. Being here would just make her soft.
That’s what she told herself anyway.
Carmilla was climbing the stairs to the exit landing by the time Laura caught up to her. “You didn’t have to be so mean, you know.”
“Did I hurt his feelings?” Carmilla asked with an exaggerated pout.
“Some people have emotions, Karnstein,” Laura snapped, “and that’s not something for them to be ashamed of, and it’s not something that you get to make them feel bad for having.” She pushed past Carmilla to exit through the door first, leaving Carmilla on the landing.
Carmilla couldn’t will herself to move for a moment, frozen by a feeling that she didn’t want to examine. Her eyes dropped to the warehouse floor, where the stock room attendant was returning to his post. Shaking herself out of the moment, she shoved her way roughly through the door.
---
With no Perry to accommodate for Carmilla’s eating preferences, Carmilla had to take dinner at Zeus with the rest of the base. Thankfully, the huge amount of people in Zeus meant that dinner was staggered, so Carmilla slipped into one of the later sessions that were less busy.
She’d lost track of Laura after she’d stormed out of the stock room, although that was probably because she hadn’t looked. Even brushing past the memory of being told off by the scientist left Carmilla feeling an uncomfortable mix of anger and shame, so Carmilla chose to ignore it. She was good at that.
She collected a tray from the kitchen slot, the menu on the wall said ‘sautéed vegetables, steak, and Jell-O’ but it just looked like mush, mush and a cup of lime green jelly. She had to credit Perry, her food looked like food.
Taking a seat at one of the empty tables in the corner, she started to pick through the mush, looking for something resembling a lump, which could trick her into thinking she was eating actual food.
A person sat across from her, and she rolled her eyes at her tray, ignoring their presence until a gently even voice said, “Carmilla.”
Her stomach sank.
“It’s nice to see you again.”
“What’s up, Doc?” she replied, finally putting aside her fork and looking up. Her voice was heavy with irony, as was the tight smile she offered.
Dr Cochrane gave an even smile that matched her voice. Her blonde hair was cropped short now, with a long fringe that swept down across her forehead and tucked behind her ear. It was a surprisingly severe looking haircut, for a woman who acted as if her personality was a bubble wrap for others. Wrinkles lined her face, not hidden by makeup, but instead displayed with confidence as if they were badges of honour for her.
“I’m very well thank you, Carmilla, how are you?”
“Great,” Carmilla replied through gritted teeth. There was something about the softness of this woman that made Carmilla harder. She didn’t trust it; no one was that soft without something hidden beneath the surface.
“Have you invented anything new?” The question was posed lightly, and the way that it almost sounded like small talk made Carmilla’s hackles rise.
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
Dr Cochrane’s blue eyes were fixed on hers, and they said what she never would - liar, liar, liar.
Another plastic tray clattered onto the table in between them, and Carmilla felt an unspeakable relief that Laura had chosen this moment to appear. At least, until Laura started to speak.
“And another thing!” Laura exclaimed, as if they hadn’t finished their last conversation. “You go around with this whole ‘big bad’ persona thing but we both know it’s just a façade!” It was only after she’d blown up that she seemed to realise Dr Cochrane’s presence, and all of the fury crumbled from Laura’s face as she turned bright red. “Oh, oh my god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to...” She sat in her seat with a meek grimace. “I’m Laura, I’m from Athena.”
Dr Cochrane just seemed entertained by the whole thing (which, of course she was) and she clasped Laura’s hand for a firm handshake. “Dr Cochrane.”
“Oh!” Laura perked up immediately, previous embarrassment forgotten. “What are you a doctor in?”
Doctors were a dime a dozen in the Mars colony, especially Athena, but the genuine interest from Laura made it seem like a rarity.
“I’m a psychiatrist,” Dr Cochrane answered.
Laura’s eyes flicked over to Carmilla for the shortest of moments, but to the engineer it felt like a lifetime. It was a floodlight aimed squarely at something she had done her best to ignore.
She stood suddenly, sending the chair skittering back on the floor with a loud scrape, and walked out of the cafeteria.
---
Three years ago
Carmilla watched the second hand on the analogue clock tick up. It was the only analogue clock she’d seen on Mars. She wondered if that had some significance.
“I’m not the enemy, Carmilla,” Dr Cochrane said, gently trying to push her into revealing more. “I need to clear you before you can return to duty, I’m trying to work with you, not against you.” Then, she asked the question that she’d asked in every session, “Why were you in that storm?”
Carmilla counted each second as it ticked by. “I told you.”
Dr Cochrane didn’t falter. “You’re an engineer. You’ve been on Mars for four years. You don’t get accidentally caught in storms.”
“Accidents happen,” Carmilla parroted back to her. Her eyes finally dropped to Dr Cochrane, an empty laziness threaded through her expression.
Dr Cochrane studied her for a long minute.
“Is that your last answer?”
Carmilla didn’t need to reply verbally to convey her response.
“Very well.” Dr Cochrane’s face fell with disappointment as she started to touch the screen of her desktop computer, filling out the necessary paperwork. “I’m clearing you, but Carmilla-”
Carmilla was already halfway to the door, but she paused at her name, although she didn’t turn.
“You can contact me any time, my door is always open. Physically, or technologically.”
She left.
---
Even though the outside of Zeus was wrapped in a protective sheet, the ceiling on the inside was a tough plastic polymer. The sheet was designed to shield the base from the worst of the weather, while the plastic provided a secure housing. A little known fact was that there was a maintenance area between the two, so that the sheet could be checked over and fixed easily from underneath. Even lesser known was that if you were at the summit of the structure, you would be able to see the sky above through a small transparent window in the sheet.
Carmilla was there now, lying down in her space suit and staring at the sky that had brought her to this planet. She had always considered the stars to be renewing, they let her escape from whatever reality she’d trapped herself in, but they weren’t doing their job as usual tonight.
A few metres away, the panel slid open, projecting a stream of artificial light onto the oversheet that, up close, was closer to purple than white.
A space helmet popped up through the hatch, the person inside looking around until they turned to Carmilla and she saw Laura’s face through the visor.
Relief swept Laura’s face as she fully climbed out of the hatch and gingerly walked over to Carmilla before dropping to her knees next to her. She used a gloved finger to start inputting things into her stats monitor, and then looked at Carmilla expectantly.
Carmilla’s stats monitor beeped and she looked down at it.
Communication Request: Dr Laura Hollis
Accept Decline
Carmilla made a small sound of annoyance in the back of her throat and she accepted the request.
“You know, there’s nothing embarrassing about therapy.”
“Okay, that’s...” Carmilla went to get up, annoyed with herself for even accepting the request, because how had she expected something different?
“My mom was in the first phase,” Laura said and Carmilla stilled. Slowly, she turned to the other girl, searching her face to see if she was being honest. Deciding that no lie could ever bring someone the amount of sadness that now lay bare in Laura’s eyes, Carmilla waited for her to continue.
“Base Hera,” Laura’s voice cracked, but she didn’t seem to notice. “She was one of the people that, uh, that stayed in the control room.”
There was a reason why Zeus was mostly underground, and Athena was carved into dense rock formations.
Hera was the reason.
Base Hera had been the first, the start of the Mars colonisation, and the biggest tragedy since. Loose piping and a week of rough storms had compromised the base, depressurizing the building. The only reason there had been survivors were two people who remained in the depressurized control room in space suits and salvaged all the airlocks while the others were safely in the underground room.
Carmilla didn’t know what to say, so instead she just sat up and gave Laura her silent attention.
“My dad was so against me coming here.” Laura let out a soft huff, painting a momentary fog over the bottom of her visor. “He disowned me while I was doing the program. He didn’t talk to me until after I graduated, when I’d gotten my deployment date.” She shook her head slightly before adding quickly, “We talk every week now. He’s okay. Mostly.
“When we lose people, it does things to us,” Laura said, speaking slowly and deliberately. “It made me want to come to Mars, to study it, to make sure that something like Hera never happened again. It made my dad sure that he’d never come.” Her gaze locked with Carmilla’s, and Carmilla expected some sort of prying into her past to come from the scientist, but instead she said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you before. Sometimes I forget.”
“Forget what?” Carmilla asked, barely above a whisper.
“Everyone here’s lost something.”
Carmilla knew what oxygen starvation felt like, she was intimately familiar with the pain and the choking bitter that came with it. The way that Laura’s words made her feel was the first thing that had come close to it, but for some reason instead of panicking her, it steadied her.
Laura stared above them, through the lens of the plastic, into the stars that they’d crossed to get here. “It’s beautiful.”
Carmilla joined Laura’s gaze, to the clear, full sky that signified where they had come from, and how much further they had to go. “Is it?”
Laura’s eyes slid down to Carmilla, her expression unreadable. The reflection of the stars blanketed her visor, superimposed over Laura’s face, creating ghosts of constellations in her eyes and through her hair.
Although Laura didn’t say anything, Carmilla suddenly knew - it was.