Champion of Mars by Guy Haley Page B

Valles Marineris was paved, cut into the rock high off the flood plain. Trucks thundered along it, guided at ridiculous speeds by near-I. A few private groundcars swept along among the trucks: large-wheeled offroaders in the main, homesteaders coming into the city for supplies. The cars’ own systems slaved themselves to the lorries, making the most of the larger vehicles’ slipstreams. With no need to drive themselves on the road, their occupants were probably asleep; it was damn early.
    That was down there. The lights of Martian Highway 1 were way below Jonah. His quad rattled up the sloping road, a pioneer trail, blasted a century back, a quick way out of the Marineris onto the Tharsis highlands. It was dangerous as hell, and Jonah’s grandma did not like him going up it. It twisted back and forward on itself, in places running through tunnels or into natural caverns rudely opened to the sky with nGel. The road dipped up and down the uncountable subsidiary valleys and peaks of the canyon wall as it worked its way up the switchback to Tharsis, the road edge sometimes folded safely in rock, other times dropping exhilaratingly to the canyon floor miles below.
    It was Jonah’s idea of fun.
    “How high are we up, Cybele?” he shouted into his mask. His brown skin was caked in red dust. The quad’s electric engine was quiet, but its knobbled tires made a racket on the loose rock. The trail wasn’t much used, now the main Tharsis road was open, and it had been left to crumble.
    “You do not need to shout, Jonah,” came the machine’s reply. Her voice was warm. He liked that voice a lot. “I can hear you perfectly well. We are four kilometres from the valley floor.”
    “How far to go?” He had to ask; there was no signal on his implant in this part of the canyon. There was enough room in the quad’s onboard system for the family AI, so he’d borrowed her for the day, it had seemed sensible to have some back-up. He’d copied her over and deactivated the original. Even up here on Mars, the laws banning AI-splitting and copying were in force.
    Grandma Sue would be mad, but he needed the company, and the help, and Jonah was glad to spend time with the machine. She was an old model, a little slow and not very good at being human, but she never judged him or got angry, and she even flirted a little with him. He liked that.
    “You are sixteen hundred metres from the canyon rim in terms of elevation. You still have seventy kilometres of road to traverse, however.”
    It was a damn long way up that road! That was why he had set out so early, while it was still dark. Landfall was due late in the day, in the evening. He had twelve hours or so to get to the best vantage point, nearly two hundred kilometres of rough, switchy road to travel.
    Ah, he was due an adventure. His homework could wait, and as they kept telling him at school, this was history in the making. If he was living through it, he should really see at least some of it rather than sitting in a windowless classroom listening to someone else describe it. It wouldn’t wash as an excuse, but it justified the jaunt to him.
    He whooped as his quad slewed around a cone of scree. His grandma would not like the way he was driving, not one bit, but she worried too much, she’d been so protective since his mum and dad had died, suffocating Jonah with her concern. He wasn’t stupid. Life up here made people grow up fast. Grandma Sue smothered him because she loved him, and because she was sad, but it made him itchy mad. He chafed under it. He was proud of his mother and father. They were all pioneers here, life was dangerous. They’d died. That was that.
    He was smart enough and old enough to know that this was his way of grieving, and that he took risks to prove to himself that he was still alive. Knowing that meant he was at least a little bit careful. He wasn’t going to go totally off the rails.
    Just a little bit, maybe.
    The road was twenty metres wide in most