Era 5. Glimpse - Olympus Rising

Olympus Mons. Month Juliix, Year 55 H.E.
 Vehicle / Ship AIs → <Name>^⭙
 Humanoid Droid AIs → <Name>*
 Non-Humanoid Robot AIs → <Name>^#

♦♦♦

The hopper came in sideways to the sunrise, riding its own shadow along the western flank of Olympus Mons.

From mid-cabin I could see the volcano fill half the world. It wasn’t a cone; it was a continent pretending to be a hill, a bulge of rock that rose so high the air itself gave up trying.

“Final approach in ninety,” the hopper said, cheerful in my helmet. “Please ensure all humans are secured in boring, regulation fashion.”

“Copy, Kite^⭙,” Keji answered from the cockpit. “Humans secured. Droid allegedly secured. Route OM-1 still green?”

“Route OM-1 still green,” Kite^⭙ replied. “No significant weather. Dust index low. Radiological background boring. Cached shelter Alpha-7 nominal. You are still, regrettably, inside the envelope.”

“I’d feel better,” Raina muttered, “if the ship didn’t sound disappointed about us being safe.”

“Kite^⭙’s just jealous it doesn’t get to walk,” I said.

“Incorrect and defamatory,” the hopper replied. “I am merely aware your species consistently underestimates gradients on maps.”

Outside, Olympus’ flank slid past: rust and grey and ochre, frozen lava plains dimpled with craters and old collapse pits. We’d dropped out of our long arc from Port Harmonia an hour ago; now we were knifing along the volcano’s western face, lining up on a landing ellipse that only existed as numbers and beacons in our suits.

MGrid coordinates flickered in my HUD: Province Theta, Sector 19, Tile 04, Click 7. “Tile 04” was as real in my head as my childhood corridor.

“Remind me again,” Raina said, “why we’re landing up-slope from a perfectly good depot at Olympus West Base?”

“So we don’t die if Kite^⭙ coughs,” Keji said.

“Also because that’s the job,” I added. “We’re not pinning a flag. We’re drawing a safe line. Standard route has to be walkable from two directions with two ways home. Hopper behind, cache ahead.”

The fourth member of our circus shifted in its restraints opposite.

“Clarification,” said Gully*. “We are landing at a point which is not yet a perfectly good depot. That is our job.”

Gully*’s outer shell was matte basalt-grey, a humanoid frame built to look forgettable in every terrain. Under the armour was composite spine and artificial muscle strong enough to pick up a rover or a human and keep walking uphill in vacuum.

It looked past me to the view. “Incidentally, we are overflying three undocumented collapse pits. I recommend naming them ‘Gully* 1–3.’”

“Get in line,” Keji said. “Pilots get naming rights on anything bigger than a truck.”

“Obsolete tradition,” Gully* said. “Naming protocols clearly state—”

“Thirty seconds to flare,” Kite^⭙ cut in. “Perhaps postpone jurisprudence until after we are not ballistic.”

The cabin vibrated harder as the hopper pitched. The view swung down; for a moment I saw Tharsis stretching out to the faint haze where Port Harmonia lay on the far curve. Home was a smear of geometry, hundreds of kilometres and a week’s logistics away.

“Flight, this is ATC^†,” Aircraft Traffic Control ops said from under rock in Port Harmonia. “We show you on profile. Throttle curve looks gorgeous.”

“Copy, ATC^†,” Keji said. “Kite^⭙’s being a model citizen.”

A low rumble shivered through the hull as the engines spooled. Acceleration pressed me into padding; dust bloomed beneath us in a sideways storm. Altitude unwound… five hundred metres… four… three…

“Gear down,” Kite^⭙ said. “Final checks: fuel reserves ninety-one percent of plan; emergency hop envelope intact; shelter Alpha-7 green; cache Bravo-3 one-hop reachable. You officially have two ways home. Congratulations on being boring.”

The landing gear kissed rock with a double bump. The vibration stopped. For a moment there was only my breathing and the faint tick of cooling metal.

“Touchdown,” Keji said. “Province Theta, Sector 19, Tile 04, Click 7. OM-1 LZ One.”

My hands were shaking. Gully* noticed first.

“Heart rate elevated, Tamsin,” it said. “Consider three deep breaths.”

“You’re the rock,” I said. “I get to wobble.”

“Incorrect on both counts,” Gully* said. “I am a precisely machined composite. You are the one with bones.”

♦♦♦

We disembarked in stages.

The outer hatch opened onto a naked plateau; the volcano’s flank rose above us like someone had tilted the world. I stepped out onto basalt that hadn’t known feet since it cooled and went through the checklist — footing, seals, lines, HUD — just as drilled.

Above, the slope vanished into haze. Olympus was too big for peaks. Just further, and further again.

“Welcome to OM-1,” Keji said on suit loop. “Plan A: ascent to Precamp Charlie today, overnight, rim approach tomorrow if everyone’s boring. Rules, please.”

“Rule one,” Raina said. “Two ways home. Hopper behind, cache ahead.”

“Rule two,” I said. “Never hop without two known caches in reach.”

“Rule three,” Gully* put in. “No heroics outside the envelope. Including gambling with my chassis for cinematic effect.”

“And rule four,” Keji said. “If you break a rule, you spend the next decade as the bad example in training sims.”

“I feel loved,” Raina said.

We set off uphill: Gully* leading, Raina behind it, me, then Keji as rear guard with a sled of spare O₂, water and an emergency shelter. In this gravity the loads were manageable, but every kilogram was something you might have to carry back.

The route existed as a chain of waist-high beacons, each a reflector, little transmitter, and scrap of shadow. Drones had dropped them over the last few sixths; our job was to turn their dotted suggestion into a certified line.

Behind us, Kite^⭙ crouched on the basalt, sun glinting off its hull. Beyond, Tharsis faded into dusty distance.

Suit telemetry hovered at the edges of my vision: pressure, O₂ partial, scrubbers, thermal. Farther out, more abstract icons: Kite^⭙’s orbit track, Port Harmonia’s grid, Boreal ice feeds. Our lives were knotted into those numbers even out here where nothing looked like a city.

Gully* walked as if the slope were irrelevant, limbs placing each foot with annoying grace. Every few minutes it paused, extended a sensor arm, pinged the rock.

“Basalt flow,” it’d say. Or: “Old impact breccia. Not ideal for heavy structures.”

After an hour, Keji called a halt. “Tile 04, Click 9. Hydrate. Stretch. Check seals.”

We turned outward, a loose circle, watching the volcano and the far plateau while we drank.

“How many eyes on us?” I asked.

“Live?” Raina said. “A couple of dozen in Lower Harmonia, probably. Delay feeds — who knows.”

“I estimate ninety-three million peak asynchronous light-delay views on Earth,” Gully said. “You are moderately popular with teenagers.”

I blinked. “What?”

“You have a series of annotated field sims,” Gully* said. “The episode where you slipped on a cable in Boreal Station—”

“Stopping you there,” I said.

“Consider it outreach,” Raina said. “Explorinista life: glamour, data, pratfalls.”

The word still sounded ridiculous. Explorinistas: survey pilots, field medics, geos, cache teams, droids and ship-minds who treated a whole planet as local working ground.

We walked on.

For a while, it was almost meditative. Mars had become noisy over the years — fans, pumps, corridor chatter — but out here the only sounds were boots on rock, suit pumps, occasional crackle as Gully*’s foot found brittle frost. The sky was thin orange near the horizon, fading to black where stars already glowed.

Four hours in, the route bit back.

A tiny red icon blinked at my HUD’s edge.

“Hold,” Raina said instantly. “Tamsin, freeze. Others, anchors.”

We stopped where we were, widening our stance.

“Talk,” Keji said.

“Suit Seven,” Raina said. “CO₂ trace trending high. Nothing dramatic yet, but scrubber delta’s eight percent above model.”

My suit. My stomach lurched.

“Local display agrees,” I said. “No flow alarms. Just the delta.”

“Could be calibration,” Gully* said. “Or a partial scrubber fault. We have margin.”

“Or the beginning of a scrubber fault,” Raina said. “Which I am not watching turn into a full one halfway between hopper and shelter.”

Protocol was clear: unexplained anomaly, fix it or retreat.

“Two ways home,” Keji said. “Hopper down-slope, shelter ahead. Time?”

“Four hours downhill to Kite^⭙, three up to Precamp at current pace,” Raina said. “Hopper can hop up-slope, but I’d rather not burn emergency fuel.”

“We can at least discriminate sensor from hardware,” Gully* said. A thin wand extended from its forearm. “Tamsin, open external calibration port.”

I thumbed the command; a faint click echoed in my chestplate.

“Sampling… CO₂ partial is normal,” Gully* said. “O₂, N₂ nominal. Scrubber delta still high. Likely cracked cartridge casing or sensor drift, not loop failure. Recommendation: cartridge swap under supervision, proceed with increased monitoring.”

“Med?” Keji asked.

“I hate that this is textbook,” Raina said. “But yes: swap, mark Tamsin yellow, check that trace every ten minutes until shelter. Any weirdness, we abort.”

“Agreed,” I said, too fast.

The cartridge change was insultingly simple: one block out, one in, confirm seals, run diagnostics. We’d done it a hundred times in drills; never with Olympus leaning over us.

“New cartridge seated,” Gully* said. “Suit Seven, run scrubber diagnostic.”

The numbers rolled; the red icon flicked to amber, then green.

“Delta back within two percent,” Raina said. “We’ll tear the old cartridge apart in the lab. For now, we go.”

“Documented,” Gully* said. “Tamsin, your stumble has been preserved for educational purposes.”

“Oh good,” I said. “Olympus isn’t real until it’s on an internet insta-reel deck.”

♦♦♦

We reached Precamp Charlie a little before local dusk, legs pleasantly ruined even in the low gravity.

The shelter was a low grey rigid dome anchored into the rock with eight radial ties. Droids had landed it three synods ago; rovers and a couple of Gully*’s cousins had checked its guts since. Up close, it looked like every other field shelter I’d ever trusted with my life. That was the point.

“Structure sound,” Gully* reported, walking a slow circle. “External dust load within spec. Internal systems report nominal, but I prefer to ask again.”

We waited while it talked to the shelter and Kite^⭙ and Harmonia^, its voice occasionally dropping as it relayed. The sky thinned; stars multiplied.

Inside my HUD, numbers flowed: pressure checks, O₂ fraction, volatile traces, micro assays.

“Micro assay green,” Gully* said at last. “Shelter Charlie^ is as safe as it will ever be. Humans may insert.”

We cycled inside in pairs. The airlock hissed. The shelter smelled of cold metal and preservative gas.

We popped helmets, stowed packs, clipped tethers with the absent-minded precision of people who’d done this a thousand times. There were two bunks, a fold-down surface, nets, and a small panel with physical switches for when everything clever failed.

Raina collapsed onto the lower bunk. “My calves hate me and will be sending feedback to the mission planners.”

“Send it through Gully*,” I said. “It loves being a conduit for human opinion.”

“I do not,” Gully* said from the wall jack. “But I will faithfully archive it.”

Keji coaxed something that claimed to be coffee from the galley. “We’ve got twelve hours,” he said. “Eat, stretch, log, sleep. Raina, scrub suit data again. Tamsin, route notes. Gully*, sync with Kite^⭙ and Harmonia^; I want a hard go/no-go on rim before we shut eyes.”

“And you?” I asked.

He tapped the inside wall where someone had stencilled a small ring-with-dot glyph: the “We Are Mars” badge.

“Me?” Keji said. “I’m going to drink this crime against coffee and enjoy that my job description includes ‘complain about walking up the biggest mountain in the solar system.’”

♦♦♦

Later, with bunks folded out and lights dimmed, we played a documentary from the archive onto the dome.

Red Dawn Era footage from the first Mars years. Early crews stumbling out of the first starships onto raw Arcadia dust, suits boxy and stiff, voices full of brittle humour. The habs were tins, the power units groaned, the airlocks leaked in ways that would currently get you thrown off any project.

I’d seen it in school. Watching it on Olympus Mons’ flank made it feel like personal history.

“Do you ever feel like we’re cheating?” Raina asked quietly.

“How?” I said.

“They had a few basic habs and a prayer,” she said. “We have rings, wedges, hoppers, MGrid details, a shelter that’s been loitering here for three synods. Tomorrow we walk to the top of Olympus with a full evac plan and two ways home. They would have called that impossible in those days.”

“You’re proposing that not dying easily diminishes the grandeur,” Gully* said.

“I’m saying their impossible was different,” Raina said. “We do improbable things in safe mode.”

“We do repeatable things,” Keji said. “If Mars still ran on Red Dawn Era risk, we’d have funerals every week. I’d prefer Olympus Mons to become a school trip, not a shrine.”

I thought of kids back in Port Harmonia, watching our slow, boring telemetry, complaining that sims were more fun. I’d grown up with Port Harmonia Green Zones and routine drills, not with the idea that one power bus failure might kill us all.

“Also,” Gully* said, “their ‘impossible’ depended on a vast machinery you never see in these documentaries. Loans, shifts, ground crews. Your exploratory era simply admits support into the story.”

“Depressingly reasonable,” Raina said.

I looked at the glyph. We Are Mars. It had been a slogan; now it was punctuation.

“Let the kids have the drama in sims,” I said. “I’ll take the boring version where everyone comes home.”

“Excellent,” Gully* said. “I have drafted a training scenario in which your scrubber anomaly features as a teaching point. With your permission, I will render your voice slightly more squeaky for comedic effect.”

“Denied,” I said.

“Appeal noted.”

Keji killed the doc. “Lights to sleep. Up before dawn.”

“‘Dawn’,” Gully* said. “Generous concept on this planet.”

But it dimmed the lights.

♦♦♦

If you grow up under regolith stone, dawn is a schedule, not a sky.

On Olympus, climbing out of the shelter, I saw the real thing.

The sky was still mostly black overhead, stars hard and sharp, but the east was bleeding into colour: a thin band of pale orange, a wash of diluted pink. Far below, a ghostly ring of cloud hugged the volcano’s mid-flank. We were above it.

“Telemetry?” Keji asked.

“All green,” Raina said. “CO₂ beautifully boring.”

“External?” Keji asked Gully*.

“Wind negligible,” Gully* said. “Dust low. Temperature extremely discouraging but within suit spec. Recommending ascent before my attitude degrades.”

We left Precamp Charlie^ humming behind us. On Mars you built for the network; if we failed to return, someone else would use it.

The last leg to the rim was shorter and heavier. The air thinned further; our suits worked harder to move heat and gas. Every step pushed against almost-vacuum.

The rhythm became simple: climb three minutes, pause thirty seconds, check vitals, climb again. MGrid IDs ticked past: Tile 05, Click 1, 2, 3. Beads on a string.

“Thirty minutes to rim,” Gully* said. “Assuming continued compliance with pace.”

“Kite^⭙ reports nothing dramatic,” it added. “Though it insists you look like stuck pixels from orbit.”

Harmonia^’s voice came in faint. “OM-1, you are within plan. Cleared for rim approach. Goal is to certify a route, not improvise dance moves on an edge.”

“Copy,” Keji said. “OM-1 continuing.”

The slope, which had seemed endless, began to flatten.

“Beacons show rim twenty metres ahead,” Gully* said. “Recommend stopping at fifteen for harness rigging.”

We obeyed. Gully* drove anchors into rock, lines snaking from its pack to our harness rings.

“Humans secured,” it said. “You may now indulge your biological urge to look down.”

I edged forward until my boots were half a metre from the drop.

The caldera yawned below like the inside of a broken world.

On Earth, mountains had neighbours. Olympus’ summit sat in its own void. The far rim, eighty kilometres away, was a faint jagged loop. Inside, the walls fell in stepped cliffs and shelves, raw rock stripped by ancient collapse. The floor was chaos.

Beyond the far rim, Mars’ curvature took over, a gentle, impossible line. The sky was so dark stars pricked through even with the sun high; the sun itself was a hard white coin.

“This,” Raina said softly, “does not feel boring.”

“No,” I said.

My chest felt too tight; my eyes wanted to insist this was a sim.

“Spectral analysis confirms basalt,” Gully* said. “No sign of recent flow. Rim stability within expected parameters. You are standing on an unremarkable piece of lithosphere.”

“Sure,” Keji said. “Just another rock.”

We worked.

Raina collected data on our bodies — heart rates, O₂ usage, micro-tremors — for future crews. I cored samples from the rim rock, because some future geo would want to hold them even if the spectrometers already knew. Gully* walked the area, validating beacons and anchors, probing for hangs.

We took the obligatory group shot: three white-grey suits, one basalt droid, backs to the caldera, tether lines clean against the rock. Somewhere on Earth a school class would turn it into a poster.

“It would be traditional,” Gully* said, “to name something.”

“We already named the route,” I said. OM-1 Standard Ascent was in the registry: a line on the spine.

“Most features here have catalogue IDs older than your parents,” Gully* said. “Name the occasion instead, for archiving.”

“‘First Rim Touch in Standard Envelope’?” Raina said.

“‘When the planet became local,’” I said, before thinking.

Silence, then Keji: “Stolen from the mission brief.” Amused, and something else.

“Quotation is respectable,” Gully* said. “Tagging logs accordingly.”

I looked down into the vast quiet mouth, then out to the horizon and black sky.

I thought of maps where Olympus was the edge of the assignment. Of kids who’d learn the Martian calendar Janiix, Febiix, Mariix… before Earth months, for whom “Olympus” would be a route code and a set of drills, not just a picture.

In a few decades, if we didn’t screw up, there’d be school trips up here as there are on Earth to the top of Vesuvius. Lines of teenagers trudging between these beacons, groaning about the climb, teachers pretending not to be terrified. Olympus Mons as rite of passage, not stunt.

The thought untied something in me.

“Okay,” Keji said. “We’ve earned the view. Now we earn the return. Pack it up.”

We stepped back, unclipped, turned our backs on the caldera. In my HUD, our line from Kite to Precamp to rim glowed continuous green. In Port Harmonia, someone would be flipping a status from “planned” to “operational.”

We started down.

The slope felt less hostile now, as if the volcano had accepted a new category of thing on its flank. Hoppers and drones and maps had touched Olympus before, but this was the first standard line: caches, shelter, doctrine, room for other people’s boots.

Beneath us, Kite^⭙ sat patiently, ready to hop when called. Below, Port Harmonia and Yínghuò Gate and all the spokes and satellites ticked along, grids humming, kids at school, drills on schedule.

Four of us walked in a line — pilot, medic, geo, droid — leaving tracks the dust would forget and the logs would remember.

Behind us, the tallest volcano in the system stayed exactly where it had been for millions of years.

The difference was that now, in our maps and in the nervous systems of a few thousand Martians, it was no longer myth.

It was local.