(14) Nandroids on Mars (pt2)

"Thirty seconds," Tilly rattled off absentmindedly, blue optics darting between the harsh green text of several clunky displays. The last few weeks of space travel had passed like a blur for the two mechanical pilots, their days spent keeping up with the busywork of maintaining  their life-sciences experiments. The ant colony brought along for the journey had failed and collapsed much to Tilly's dismay, but the plants in the shared garden experiment were relatively thriving even now as they approached their target. Tatyana drew in a sharp breath and shut her optics for a moment, the memory of their explosive departure from Earth fresh on file for her retrieval. The Neriene was pointed backwards at Mars, denying her passengers a view of anything but the stars as they made the final approach. Unspoken fears of failure for the novel nuclear drive to reignite after months spent drifting in the cold of space rose to the top of Tatyana's mind and she opened her mouth to speak in the last moments, only to be preemptively cut off by her partner. "Three...two...one...first bomb!" The orange-haired nandroid seemed almost absurdly giddy, the soft silicon of her faceplate stretched to limit in a manic grin as her wide optics took in the moment in detail. Tatyana's optics shut involuntarily at the first shove she felt in her seat while the first bomb detonated behind the ship, slowing their velocity by a fraction in an instant. Peeking her right optic open a moment later the Russian bot watched as her American counterpart gripped her armrests tighter with each successive burst of deceleration, marveling at her apparent ability to shrug off any danger they were in favoring instead the excitement of the moment alone. Bomb after bomb exploded in quick succession behind the Neriene, slowing the craft's velocity as it passed over the red planet below. For the last minute of the maneuver the horizon of the world underneath them appeared through the bridge's window, transfixing for a moment the gaze of both automatons. The heartbeat-like thudding of the main drive ceased, snapping the pair out of their momentary awe. "Insertion burn complete! Checking our figures and...ha!"  Tilly gripped the display screen closest to her and leaned up against her seat's restraint to read it. "Apoapsis is one-hundred eighty miles above the surface, periapsis is one-fifty-five! It's a stable orbit! TATYANA WE MADE IT!" Looking over her exuberant friend's shoulder at the window behind her and Mars through it, Tatyana let out a shaky sigh and nodded as she processed their new position in space. "Yeah."

Was Earth's moon another world, in the truest sense of that word? Tilly struggled with her programmed definitions as the pair spent the next two days relaying data back home and analyzing their newly-selected landing site in ever greater detail. What separated a planet from a moon, practically speaking when you stood on either? Tilly thought long about it as she recalled her trips to Earth's moon and contrasted  recorded imagery with the red landscape she saw rolling below her ship from her place in the observatory. "Running  third radar sweep of the site on this next pass, should be able to compare readings in another few hours," Tatyana's voice called out blandly from outside the room and down the hall. Turning in place Tilly lightly kicked off the wall and floated out the door to the hallway surrounding the ship's central shaft. Following the curved wall she worked her way towards the bridge and stopped there, gripping the doorframe and floating in place as her Russian friend turned to look over her shoulder at her when she appeared. "How many more times do we need to confirm the same data? Chryse Planitia is plenty safe and we've got a good spot picked out to set down, so what's the holdup?" Tilly asked with an expression not unlike a child asking to open a Christmas present early. Tatyana rose from her seat and turned in the zero g to face the American, strained patience modeled across her steel faceplate. "Moscow wants to be extremely certain of a successful landing, and as you well know-" she began, only to be cut off by Tilly rolling her optics and finishing her sentence for her. "and you're in command of landing and surface activity, I know I know," she said with a sigh before turning to stare out through the bridge's window at the world below them. "I just hate sitting up here waiting, we should be down there right now!" For an instant Tatyana recalled seeing similar expressions on her boys back home in response to being told to wait for some reward, and like that her growing annoyance with her partner dissipated with a smile. "We can be here as long as we need to be, so why the rush?" Tilly made a quiet sound of disgust and shook her head quickly. "I've been staring up at this place for YEARS! After all this time I'm right here, I just want to go touch it, stand on it, feel it!"  Letting out a sigh she floated herself into the room stopping only at the window and pressing her forehead to it. Tatyana rose from her seat and drifted listlessly after her, stopping to look out over her head through the window. "It just look like moon to me, only red. And I bet you ten rubles it covered in dust just like moon too, fine clingy red stuff, going to get everywhere," she said with a hint of disgust at remembering their futile efforts to contain lunar dust to Unity Base's airlock. Tilly broke her gaze with the red planet to stare back at her, wide-eyed. "Are you kidding? We've only been here a few days and look at what we've seen already! Valles Marinaris looks like someone took a kitchen knife to the whole world, like carving a big melon! And Olympus Mons? It's as wide as Arizona! Those big channels we saw yesterday were DEFINITELY rivers once, and the ice caps! Tatyana the ice caps!" Throwing back her head Tilly couldn't help but laugh. "We saw CLOUDS! Show me ANY of that on the moon!"

Word from Soviet mission control in Moscow came the following day, and orders had been given for the pilots to enter the Russian lander and separate from the Neriene. After a final check of their stowed gear, tools, sample collection containers, emergency batteries and a pair of miscellaneous flags to plant representing each nation, the small lander separated from the much larger nuclear craft. Though neither spoke out loud about it, Tilly and Tatyana both felt a momentary dread as they watched their home for the journey to Mars drift away, and each robot did her best to quell the sudden unwelcome feeling without showing it. At the preordained time Tatyana positioned the lander retrograde and lit the engines with the flick of a switch, the deceleration shoving both pilots back into their seats. After a seemingly too-long several minutes the force on them both subsided, and Tatyana was quick to check over their instruments. "De-orbit burn good, we are aimed directly at our landing zone," she announced proudly, unable to suppress a little smile at a job well done. As the minutes before reentry ticked down both were uncharacteristically silent , noting only their altitude to one another curtly while they waited out their fall downward. A gentle rocking began to oscillate the cabin, turning to a rougher shaking in under a minute as the aft end of their lander began scraping against the thin atmosphere. While the lander shook with increasing intensity around them Tilly looked out in wonder through the small porthole to her right as quick white bursts of plasma played across the glass outside. "Velocity not where it should be, we are not slowing down enough!" Tatyana's voice called out breaking her from her momentary trance. "What?" Grimacing the cosmobot glanced between several displays and reached for the main engine control. "It is even thinner than they thought, we will be going to fast for parachutes to work!" Taking in a deep breath to steady herself Tatyana thought back in an instant to two dozen mock landings done in the simulator back on Earth and made a rough estimate against the surplus fuel they had left in reserve. "Performing braking burn, now!" The shaking in the lander intensified accompanied by a loud roar vibrating up through the metal plating at their feet. Tatyana watched the nearest screen nervously as their velocity decreased, glancing back and forth between the display, their altimeter and the fuel indicator. As all three values diminished, the Soviet robot waited until the last possible second to shut off their engine, the fuel required for a return from the surface marked by a dull thick line on the analog display which the hovering indicator sat at. The shaking in the cabin subsided, and as she watched the altimeter tick down Tatyana silently prayed indiscriminately that their velocity was slowed enough to not shred the parachutes intended for their final descent. Strapped in her seat Tilly breathed heavily, recording every moment of the landing in overclocked hyper-fidelity while she watched her friend's fierce focus. Tatyana reached forward suddenly and flipped a switch, sending the whole lander into a lurch as wide parachutes deployed outside by pyrotechnic charge. The change in velocity was not as instantaneous as the braking burn, but both bots felt the lander begin to slow when the chutes fully expanded. "Nyet!" Tatyana called out in frustration, breaking Tilly from her trance. "STILL not slowing fast enough!  Going to overshoot landing zone by, I don't know yet!" The American nandroid blinked in surprise, then shook her head. "It's mostly open terrain and some rocks, who cares where we come down?" Tatyana scoffed and shook her head in disgust. "Dummy we are heading towards higher elevation! Dunes and cliffs Tilly! Hold on, going to try something!" Without waiting for a reply the Russian flicked another switch on the console before her and a sound like a muffled fire extinguisher rattled the cabin. "Dumping reserve RCS propellant, not going to give us much margin for docking later but is dead weight now!" As gaseous hydrogen peroxide poured out of the lander her cosmobot pilot again relied on computerized dead-reckoning to gauge the weight they'd shed in the moment while her gloved hand hovered above the engine relight switch. "Three kilometers that, that's close!" Tilly shouted as she read the metric figures off the screen in front of her and performed the split second conversion to imperial. "Da," Tatyana said with a deep inhale as she re-lit the lander's engine, immediately throttling down and keeping her optics glued to their already precarious fuel reserves. Looking back out through the hatch's porthole Tilly could see the horizon rising up as they fell no longer diagonally but almost straight downwards under Tatyana's expert guidance. Both robots sucked in air at the last moment before impact, a red light and warning alarm alerting them to their fuel's landing margin running out. The lander came down hard enough to bounce, the over-stressed shocks of the landing legs rocketing them back up for a moment before coming down again hard enough to shatter support struts and give the entire machine a noticeable tilt as it rocked to a halt. The pilots stared forwards in shock for a moment, then were briefly spun into panic as the ambient light from the porthole dimmed when one of the wide parachutes came down and momentarily blocked the sun. "S-systems, AHEM, systems check: Fuel for return way too close for comfort but, not enough to ground us. Battery power is at-" Tatyana began to read out, needing to catch a strange bug in her vocoder when she first tried to speak. "Holy smokes," Tilly interrupted her, blinking rapidly as she looked around the cabin like somebody coming out of a coma. "Holy SMOKES! Tatyana you did it! We're HERE!" Unbuckling rapidly from her set the astrobot stood up, banged her helmet lightly on the ceiling of the cabin, then pressed herself against the hatch leading to the outside. "We're here," she repeated breathlessly, her focus blurring as she resolved between the foreground and horizon of the new landscape. Without thinking she began grabbing for the hatch release, only to be stopped by a shout from behind her. "NYET! What you thinking!? May not be MUCH atmosphere in here but still more than outside, we must depressurize first!" Tatyana gave her a hard look as she scolded, too-easily falling into the tone she used when disciplining her boys back home. Tilly's cheek lights lit up with an embarrassed glow and she chastised herself internally for not thinking in the moment. "Sorry! Sorry, right! Uh well let's vent this thing so we can go outside, yeah?" she said enthusiastically after a moment's recovery. The Russian pilot only shook her head. "Tilly we follow procedure, first we inform mission control that we have arrived safely, then they run us through series of safety checks before authorization for EVA is permitted. We probably not going outside before tomorrow, maybe day after depending on orders."  Tilly's mechanical heart sank. Without a word she reached across her friend's lap and scanned the console for the atmospheric controls. "It takes seven minutes for them to even hear us and another seven for us to hear them! Do you really want to spend all our time here just waiting for confirmation of things every fifteen minutes?" Flicking a set of switches fans began whirring above them, pulling out the already thin mostly-nitrogen atmosphere from the cabin to leave it as thin as the outside. Tatyana raised a hand to protest but Tilly had already turned towards the hatchway, hard determination set on her faceplate as she rested her gloved hand on the hatch's lever. "I didn't come all this way to wait for permission to go outside."

The hatch swung open silently, and with that simple act Tilly was staring out at the surface of Mars with only the glass of her helmet between her and the new world. She must have been standing there a full minute or more, as she absentmindedly noted the voice of Tatyana in her earpiece while the Soviet recorded a short message to transmit home informing them of the safe landing. Standing at the precipice of the lander Tilly recalled every memory file she had of staring up at Mars from her home at the launch complex, her many nights atop the VAB watching the persistent red point of light arc across the night sky. And now she was on it, memorized by the dizzying sense of scale she felt thinking about the two sights. "You are letting the heat out!" Tatyana called playfully when she was done recording the message for mission control, unbuckling and turning in her seat to watch her American friend. "Huh?" Tilly blinked and shook her head as she came back to the present moment. Processing for a split second she looked down the ladder towards the surface then back to Tatyana. "Do you want the first step?" she offered with a smile. Tatyana smirked and shook her head, waving a hand in dismissal. "Nyet nyet, I had moon so you get this one." Tilly raised opened her mouth to protest that nobody in the public knew about Tatyana's achievement, but internally quelled the argument before it began. Nodding in acceptance, she turned and started out of the hatchway, reaching to grip a pair of handles outside and feeling her way down the first few rungs of the ladder. The lander was tall, larger than any she'd taken down to the moon, and the impressive scale of their shared Russian ride was evident now as she descended the ladder. Looking dead-ahead Tilly didn't see her first footstep, instead feeling it as an unexpected impediment on her climb down the ladder. Looking down quickly she spotted her boot firmly planted in red dirt, a small pile of sand built up on either side of it as it'd sunk in a fraction of an inch. She sucked in a sharp breath, then let it out slowly as she stood there in an awkward position, one leg down and the other still on the ladder. Finally she planted both feet and let go of the ladder, stumbling backwards a couple of steps and causing Tatyana to shout out in alarm. "I'm good, I'm good!" Tilly answered back enthusiastically, gaining her balance on the alien ground. "Got any first words for historical record?" Tatyana called out from the hatchway, nervously looking out around them at the hostile environment like it were some sleeping predator. Taking several steps to turn herself in place Tilly could only shake her head and balk. "Gosh, I don't know, how about 'yahoo?' " she offered with a shrug, turning to look up at her friend. Tatyana rolled her optics and put her gloved hands on her hips. "Come on, be serious! You know newspapers will want something catchy, something they can print!" Tilly looked down for a moment, searching her memory for something inspirational, anything poignant to say in such a moment, something that might play well to the billions of humans back home. "I got nothing, I guess you could say I didn't planet!" Tatyana winced. "That was terrible, you are terrible at those. Come on, have to tell them *something*!" Tilly looked down again and pondered. "Wish you were here?" She offered with another shrug, and Tatyana slapped the front of her helmet. "I'll tell them you said 'For Mankind and United States' or something then, da?" Tilly frowned, and looked downwards at the pebbles between her feet. Kneeling for a moment she scooped up a handful of the untouched land and let it slip between her gloved fingers, fascinated by each falling bit of rock and dust as the words seemed to spring easily without identifiable origin. "We came because we had to."

Tatyana breathed out a shaky sigh as her boots touched firm ground and she let go of the ladder. Looking out past her companion and around in a slow arc she saw the desolate landscape in all its grandeur, and it made her shiver. Somehow her time on the moon could not match up to this place in her mind, an empty alien world with a strange sky and a horizon that didn't feel right to her optic's aging rangefinders. Quickly she tried to refocus on the mission, the series of steps practiced exhaustively on Earth that would bring their mission to a close, and her back to her home. "We do flag planting later, da? Want them to stand far from here, otherwise our takeoff knock them over," she said with a determined smile, snapping Tilly from her momentary fascination with the ground at her feet. "Hm?" the American called back, looking over her shoulder and standing quickly. Tatyana gestured with one hand as she began to circle the lander searching for the sealed compartment opposite the ladder. Tilly followed behind her, glancing down with a start at the landing legs and the dent they'd made in the red dirt on their hard landing. "There you are!" Tatyana said with satisfaction as she uncovered and pulled at a short tether attached to the vehicle, dislodging the compartment's cover as it lowered on a pair of hinges to become a crude ramp. "I've got the right," Tilly announced, taking up position on one side of the compartment and grasping the obvious handle there. Wordlessly her counterpart grabbed at the second handle and the two machines worked perfectly in concert together, exerting more and more effort until both let go simultaneously with a huff. "It's not budging!" Tilly said in alarm turning to her friend. A moment's panic ran across Tatyana's processor, followed by the multitude of backup scenarios she'd been trained for in the event of one failure or another all replaying for her at once. "HARDER!" She called back, gritting her teeth and replanting her booted feet. Tilly did the same and both applied as much force as they could muster for half a minute, each acutely aware by internal prompt of the rapid draw on their batteries. Suddenly Tilly raised a foot off the ground to chest level and planted it on the side of the compartment, and followed it up by lifting herself and her other leg off the ground and planting it beside the first against the hull, straining for every ounce of leverage she could get. Pushing her frame to near limit Tatyana mirrored her actions, and for a moment both machines strained directly against the lander to free its cargo. A metallic shearing sound they felt rather than heard preceded the package giving way, and rather than gently sliding down the ramp as intended the rectangular object launched from its housing nearly a meter along with the robots who'd freed it. Tumbling across the red rock Tatyana felt another momentary panic, pacified when she planted her hands on the ground and stopped rolling. Pulling  back quickly at her digits reading back extremely low ground temperatures she looked to her right and spotted Tilly sitting on her backside, helmeted head thrown back in laughter. "Hey! We got it!"

Damage to the package was expected, but thankfully not discovered as the Soviet carefully inspected the folded up mass of machinery for any piece out of place. "Must have gotten stuck when we come down hard, was supposed to slide right out nice and easy. Test model back home did, at least," she mumbled as she ran her gloved hands over the milled steel beams and supports. Tilly put  a hand to her hip, giving the strange assemblage a glance up and down in suspicion. "It doesn't look very much like a rover right now," she said skeptically, stepping forward to place her own hand on the packed vehicle and running it over a circular mesh wheel tucked tightly along the top. Rounding the pallet-sized rectangle Tatyana reached for a small plastic envelope affixed to the rear bumper and quickly tore it off, ignoring her friend's passive skepticism. Though she had the order of operations for unpacking the vehicle tucked away on file internally, her training had enforced redundancy as a rigid practice, and so she carefully tore the top of the plastic envelope to free the instructions held within, reading each line in a careful measured voice. Tilly blinked, looked down at the folded rover and gave it a quizzical look. The rover she'd briefly gotten to drive at White Sands hadn't looked anything like the mass of parts before her nor had she trained to operate this foreign design, and as Tatyana rattled off the steps required to unfold their ride she felt her eyelids begin to droop at the dry technical readout. "I'll uh, follow your lead then, what came first again?"

Less than an hour after it was freed from the confines of the lander the robot's rover was standing upright on four wire mesh wheels, the frame standing at waist-level above the hard packed dirt. Tilly scanned the horizon around them, picturing the many places this little buggy might take them, when a gentle humming sounded over her headset. Glancing back she spotted Tatyana checking over the rover with a little smile across her steel face, humming tunelessly to herself. Looking up absentmindedly she caught Tilly's amused gaze and involuntarily flashed her squared cheeklights while looking back down sharply. "Sorry, is bad habit, sometimes catch myself at it while packing boys' lunches," she confessed quickly, standing up and gazing at the rover. Tilly only giggled and placed her gloved hands on the frame, hefting her light form up onto it and settling down into one of two lawnchair-like seats. Patting her knees impatiently she turned to smile expectantly towards Tatyana. "Well? Are we gonna go for a ride or not?" The cosmobot blinked in surprise, opened her mouth to scold, then closed it in quiet resignation. "Orders are to inform mission control that we've deployed rover and wait for permission, but," she trailed off, glancing between the lander behind her and the eager nandroid before her. Shrugging she put a hand on the frame and lifted herself off the ground, rocking the lightweight buggy as she settled into the driver's seat and turned to smirk at her friend. After the long journey to get here and the many hours listening to the enthusiastic robot talk at great lengths about her dreams to be here, Tatyana felt it unnecessarily cruel to deny her a little test drive at the very least. "I suppose we SHOULD be sure that rover is operating normally before we check in with home, da?"

Kicking up short-lived plumes of dust and gravel behind them with every bounce the two robots rolled across the red landscape in their rover at a leisurely ten miles per hour, despite Tilly's occasional passive suggestion to increase speed a little at a time. Though she was reluctant at first Tatyana quickly grew comfortable behind the wheel, and rather than sticking to the scheduled roves to increasing distances over the span of days she elected to follow Tilly's fancy and simply drive for a while. During the short trip neither spoke, two pairs of optics scanning all around themselves as they took in the unfamiliar scenery. After a few minutes Tatyana glanced over her shoulder at the distant lander and slowed their speed, grinding the rover to a halt. "This is far enough, engine exhaust won't knock over flags way out here." Snapping her gaze from the landscape around them Tilly blinked, almost forgetting for a moment the flag-planting mission each had been given. "Oh! Right, those!" Without missing a beat Tilly turned to fish around in the flat bed behind their seats, quickly uncoupling a pair of tightly wrapped packages from the back of their seats. Examining both she quickly spotted the roman and cyrilic lettering marking each packaged flag on their folded poles, then grinned at a sudden unprompted thought. "Hey, what if I planted yours and you planted mine? Heh, that'd be funny," she said with an unapologetic giggle. Tatyana sighed though the corners of her mouth twitched, and she silently reached out to take the USSR flag from her friend. "C'mon, let's put these things in the dirt so we can start real mission," she said as she swung her legs off the vehicle and landed on her feet. Tilly stared for a moment at the packaged item in her hand, remembering for a split second her first trip to the moon and the flag she'd discarded there in her rush to return home. Forcing herself to be serious for a moment she nodded without meeting her friend's gaze and hopped off the rover, coming around the front of the vehicle to stand with her cosmobot partner. Silently each removed the thin cardboard and plastic wrap containing their nations' respective flag, giving no mind to the debris dropped on the barren ground at their feet. As each robot unfolded thin flagpoles and let the cloth attached to them unfurl they met optics for a moment. "Together?" Tilly asked optimistically, and was met by a confident steel-faced smile. "Together." Each machine raised their arms in unison, and with one thrust each drove the flagpole of their home nation into the red dirt of Mars. The two robots took a few steps back and stared at the limp banners, only barely budging when the weakest hint of wind passed them by. A long moment passed while both robots said nothing, each reflecting briefly and silently on just what, if anything, these banners they'd erected actually meant to machines like them.

Over the following three days the pair of international robots made a number of trips out in their little rover, which Tilly had affectionately come to call 'Spot', each successive sojourn a bit further than the previous. Though they'd overshot the initially planned landing by a considerable margin, the place Tatyana had brought them down in seemed to yield a significant amount of interesting sites to photograph and sample, each new location discovered rewarded with a flurry of excitement heard after the fourteen minute signal delay. On their sixth trip out from the lander they had stopped by a bit of exposed rock face and chiseled away some of the distinct layering that Tilly was confident pointed to water once standing in this place. While Tatyana finished tucking away the sample and deploying the last of their self-contained seismograph probe the American nandroid found herself staring out to the east as the nearly-flat landscape gently descended away from them into the low flat plain of Chryse Planetia. Her processor buzzed as she tried to run internal sims of water running across the rocky ground, of blue skies and flowing rivers, but the imagery was too incongruent with what she now saw and she found it difficult to reconcile the vastly different images she had of Mars in her mind's eye. Shaking her head silently, she marveled at the thought of worlds being so dynamic, able to change so drastically that they could become unrecognizable from epoch to epoch over a timescale that she struggled to comprehend. "Ah, that about does it! If there are such things as 'Mars-quakes' we should be able to detect them now!" Tatyana said triumphantly as she stood and admired the small deployed package at her feet connected by thick cable to a flat bit of solar paneling resting beside it in the red dust. When the nandroid did not reply right away she frowned and turned to take a few steps towards her friend, rounding the rear end of Spot on her approach. "Tilly? You crash or something?" When Tilly turned to face her she wore a strangely wistful expression on her silicon face, a sad sort of look uncharacteristic for someone as carefree as her. "This whole place was a big sea once, I just KNOW it," she said simply, and the confidence in both her voice and optics surprised Tatyana at how convincing this conviction was. Despite this, the desire to play devil's advocate was too strong for the Soviet to overcome. "Maybe, but that beg the big question, da? Where did sea go?" Tatyana cocked her head curiously at her while Tilly shook hers quickly in frustration. "I don't know, 'away'? But it was here, you see it!" Raising her arm sharply she jabbed at a set of sunken depressions in the landscape nearby, lines seemingly carved away long ago and half-smoothed by the wind erosion of countless years since. "It was flowing right here making channels and pooling up in the low spots! Tatyana we should go get a sample of THAT too!" The Russian chuckled at her friend's enthusiasm before checking the readout of their rover's remaining battery life. "Spot needs a recharge and so do we, besides we filled all the sample containers we brought on this drive already," she answered gently, letting the nandroid down easy even as her disappointment was visible in body language. "Fine, but we should come back out tomorrow for it, I bet it'll turn out to be important!" she reasoned after a moment's pout. Tatyana's steel face lit up in a grin as she momentarily recalled a hundred similar negotiations with her boys over bedtime. "Deal!"

As the rover Spot rolled along at a leisurely pace across red rock and sand back towards their lander Tatyana found herself staring out beyond the distant parked vehicle at the horizon beyond, a strange haze seeming to merge the sky and ground into one orange blur at the limit of her vision. Seated next to her Tilly's head remained on a permanent swivel, taking in the sights around her each time they rode out together no matter how much of them she'd already seen. A sudden urge swelled within from parts unknown, and without a word she reached down to unclasp the restraint holding her to her seat. Tatyana barely had time to react as the nandroid next to her placed one hand against against the rover's dash and rose shakily to a crouch, bobbing with every bounce the vehicle made. "What are you-, get down from there you'll fall out and break something!" Tatyana scolded out of habit, turning to look disapprovingly at her partner. "Come on, we're not even going that fast!" Tilly answered with a grin and rose out of her crouch, legs extended as outstretched hands kept her steady. The feeling was indescribably exhilarating, and while she wished they could push Spot to more harrowing speeds the sensation of surfing the little rover across Mars found no match in her internal memory records. For just a moment the memory file of her slow ride towards the Neriene on the launchpad rose to the surface of her mind, reliving for an instant the feeling of Earth's atmosphere tussling her hair in the daytime sun. Without thinking she raised a free hand to her helmet and unclasped it, her short hair blown out of place for a split-second by the thin air in her helmet escaping to the hardly present atmosphere of Mars. "Tilly? Hey! What are you doing?!" Tatyana demanded, tearing her gaze from the ground in front of them to stare wide-eyed at the American pilot. With one swift motion Tilly pulled the helmet free and let it hang by her side in hand. For a moment she kept her blue optics shut, feeling the gentle sensation of the thin wind playing with her hair. Without answering her friend she opened her optics slowly with a wide smile, pulling a small amount of the alien air in through her nose. "Carbon dioxide, nitrogen and...argon?" She inhaled again and her smile widened. "Yeah, there it is!" she exclaimed proudly in a muted voice that sounded wrong in the strange air, turning to beam at her partner. "Instruments already told us that Tilly! What do you think you are doing, put helmet back on!" her tone was sharper than she'd meant it to be and internally she winced. Tilly's smile wavered slightly at the admonishment from her earpiece. "Yeah but, but I can smell it! Well, detect atmospheric compounds through sample analysis but, you know what I mean! I'm not just reading it off a..." trailing off Tilly began to blink, first only a few times but then rapidly as internal warnings sounded from her right optic indicating a foreign object lodged somewhere there. "Dummy, this place even dustier than moon and dust even finer! Put! Helmet! ON!" Tatyana's insistent expression was more convincing the second time as Tilly tried to quiet her processor, already acutely aware of an abrasion to one lens which left an ugly scratch in her permanent field of vision. Reluctantly she reattached her helmet and shut her optics with a sigh, feeling somehow both foolish and triumphant at the same time. Despite needing to spend an hour that night getting compressed air blasted at her optics to clear any residual dust particles, Tilly could not honestly say that she regretted her decision to see, feel and smell Mars up close and unimpeded for a few moments. Glancing around her recharging rack that evening chasing the new line etched into her right eye Tilly felt exultant, and plugging in to charge while Tatyana took watch seemed only a formality as she felt herself somehow at full charge despite what her battery told her. "What a day," she whispered to herself in her tiny bunk, and powered down for the night.

The sun shone a brilliant yellow-white overhead as Tilly stood out on the expansive grounds of her launch complex. Breathing in she smelled almost too many compounds to identify at once, from the faint whiffs of tobacco smoke a hundred yards away to the sweet grass beneath her feet. Reaching down she ran her fingers through the green blades with a happy sigh, realizing only after a moment that her hand was still gloved. With a layer of glass now between her faceplate and the outside world all the complex scents of Earth's atmosphere faded away, replaced by the dull and thin mostly nitrogen mix that filled her helmet. "Hey! Boot up already, my turn to charge!" Tatyana's voiced seemed to come from far away as external sensors switched on and Tilly's internal boot cycle processed. "Huh?" Sitting up in a daze she rubbed her head still processing the imagery generated from her latest dream. Tatyana breathed in deeply, then yawned silently for a moment as her battery registered ten percent charge and dropping. The yawn was a cosmetic affect she knew, an autonomic bit of programming to make her seem more human. Though the response had been intended by her designers to put humans at ease, it had wound up doing the same for herself. After all, wasn't the yawn of a human some form of autonomic response, preprogrammed in some unknown way too? The idea was comforting to her as she again opened her mouth and closed her eyes while Tilly lifted herself from the small bunk and offered up the still-warm recharging cable. "Right, right. All yours," the nandroid said as she handed off the cable and stood to stretch, even her small reach impaired by the cramped cabin. Tatyana wordlessly rolled herself onto the cot with a sigh and plugged in, breathing in deeply afterwards while closing her optics. "We are still uplinking data from the seismic sensors back home through the Neriene when she passes overhead, computer is set to do it automatic so just keep watch while it does its work ," she said as she placed her hands behind her head, cozying into a comfortable position before initializing shutdown for the night. Over the following two hours Tilly checked over each small metal sample canister they'd filled so far, then watched for a while the monotonous data uplink from the sensor probes they'd placed around. Inhaling deeply and letting it out as an impatient sigh Tilly checked her internal chronometer as she looked back over her shoulder at the sleeping Russian. Tatyana would be charging for another four hours at a minimum, longer depending on how much charge she'd used that day. Glancing back at the outer hatch Tilly stared for a solid five minutes, her processor racing with the idea she kept trying to internally talk herself out of, and failed to do so. Without making a sound she stood from the lander's controls and grabbed at the red-stained space suit hanging beside the doorway leading outside.

Tilly stood out on the surface for several minutes, alone with her thoughts as she looked out over the Martian pre-dawn. The twilight felt eerily too dim for this hour she thought, weaker than early mornings in the American southwest where she'd trained. Without consciously choosing a direction she began to walk, parallel with the tracks of their last rover trip out to the west and up the imperceptible slope of the rising escarpment. "Just a little ways on my own, then I'll turn back," she murmured out loud nearly startling herself in the deafening silence.  Away from the weak floodlamps of the lander she soon  found it harder to see in the dim twilight, retrieving the short flashlight from her suit's waistband before continuing undaunted. This was what she had craved, she thought to herself as she put distance between herself and the lander. Since arriving and long before it Tilly had imagined being here like it had been for her on the moon, just her and and an empty world to explore at will. Smiling in her helmet she breathed in deep and exhaled a happy sigh, feeling just a bit giddy at her rebellious unauthorized little morning walk. Lost in her thoughts she momentarily startled herself as she arrived only a few yards from the last seismic observation post they'd deployed. Had she really walked this far already, and so quickly? Glancing back over her shoulder Tilly could still see the dim glow put off by the lander's floodlights, the recognition comforting her after a moment's doubt. It really wasn't that far, was it? Not if she could see her starting point from here, she thought confidently. Waving her small flashlight around her in a slow arc she took in the pre-dawn sight, marveling at how strange the same landscape could seem in a different light. Spotting a flicker of motion in the moving beam of light she at once froze, her smile faded instantly into disbelief as she refocused her source of light off to her left and froze. Staring down the illuminated shaft Tilly felt first very cold, then warm as the realization of what she was seeing began to dawn on her. Optics wide in shock she took off at a sprint, nearly falling several times as she hurried forwards. Before her at less than fifty paces was a sharp gouge in the landscape, a little cliff leading downwards into a wide ditch. Above the opening in the ground little wisps of barely-there white rose and dissipated in the dim red pre-light, sending Tilly's processor into immediate overclock. Stumbling again the nandroid reached the edge of the ravine and shone her light downward, scanning back and forth frantically. "Oh!" She couldn't stifle her exclamation as the light settled on a gurgling mass of roiling liquid gushing out of cleaved rock to her right, the fluid flowing down the gully even as it seemed to angrily boil and steam away in wispy little clouds. "Water!" Tilly shouted in glee as she watched the outflow roiling and kicking up dust as it flowed as a short-lived little creek. Without thinking she looked down at the edge of the gully she stood on and grinned. Only three or four feet down the sharp chasm the rock wall gave way to a sloping hill of dirt leading gently down towards the bottom, and even as she was processing  the dimensions observed she knelt at the ledge and awkwardly turned in place, curiously probing downwards with one foot feeling for somewhere to plant it. Finding purchase she quickly lowered her other leg and dropped down, grasping at the edge of the surface before starting her descent. 'Flowing water!' Tilly thought to herself privately, unable to suppress a giggle at the revelation. "And on Mars!" She spoke the second half of her thought out loud while she maneuvered herself down the short rockface. Putting all her weight for just a moment on one leg Tilly heard, or rather felt, a sharp shearing 'pop' of something vital giving way. Half a dozen internal warning prompts assaulted her awareness right as her leg gave out, sending her tumbling in confusion down the sandy dune below her. 'RIGHT HIP JOINT TERMINAL FAILURE, SEEK SERVICING NOW', the mental warning prompt was impossible to ignore even as her vision struggled to process the rotating view of the hillside she tumbled down. "AH!" Tilly cried out when she reached the bottom, rolling from her back to her side as she pressed a hand against the hip that had failed her. Cautiously she made a slow effort to stand, but no response came from her immobile limb. Breathing in deeply Tilly tried to calm herself from the sharp panic her fall had elicited and pushed herself into a seated position, wincing with a little cry as she felt her broken component grind against itself. Her arms felt like rubber for an instant, and she slumped again onto her back and stared upwards. "I'm okay, I'm okay," she breathed to herself regularly, trying to cool her processor as the gravity of being stuck in this ditch sunk in. In mid-breath she turned her head to the side, and paused her panic to watch awestruck as the little channel she'd come down to see bubbled across the dust a few yards away. For the next minute the nandroid did nothing but watch the cold-boiling stream struggle to flow, too engrossed by it to do anything else. Before long though the short outflow from the rock above had ceased, and Tilly watched with sadness as the last gasps of the little stream died away in the too-thin atmosphere, boiling off into quickly disappearing wisps and leaving only dark streaks where the flow had been strongest. Tilly watched the still creek-bed for a long while after wondering how many times such a thing had happened here with nobody to witness it, before the realization of her predicament reasserted itself at the forefront of her awareness and chilled her to her frame.

A sharp internal alarm rose Tatyana from her recharge as it always did, her series' programmers apparently never giving much thought to how jarring the transition out of a dream might feel. She'd been on Mars in her dream, but unsuited and walking around as if she were back home. She'd been strolling with her two boys, now grown men, taking her along to show off the world they had helped to build out of Mars. Sitting up in the recharging cot the feeling of pride in the twins remained with her, even as she rebooted and blinked away the strange unreality of those visions during recharge. "I'm back on, Tilly?" She called out, turning her head too look around.  A moment of silence filled the cramped lander as Tatyana quickly recognized that she was alone. Unplugging herself and standing sharply from the bunk she looked towards the main hatch, noting with a grimace the conspicuous absence of Tilly's spacesuit hanging beside it. "Dummy!" She cursed quickly before lunging towards the hatch and staring out through the small porthole. With no sign of her partner the Soviet sighed angrily and slapped a palm against her steel forehead. While many liberties had been taken so far considering the rigid mission profile provided to them by Moscow, all had been well within possible perimeters for a mission as unknown as theirs. Still, the disappearance of one of the two landing crew was well beyond a 'minor anomaly' and Tatyana steeped across the cramped lander towards the main console to transmit an impromptu report. Steel fingers paused above the keyboard, and the cosmobot tried to collect her thoughts. Staring at the keys she recalled one of the seemingly endless contingency scenarios that had been drilled into her before this mission and felt a cool shudder run up her spinal struts. "Partial loss of crew," she said out loud to herself, realizing at once what orders she'd receive back after submitting her urgent report. Presuming Tilly lost on the surface, (and relishing the American failure, she thought grimly) Moscow would order her to take off, return to the Neriene and pilot it home herself over the likely protest of the West. Turning from the console Tatyana cursed below her breath as she took her spacesuit down off the wall and began slipping it on over her crimson jumpsuit. "Can't have wandered off *that* far, daft robot."

Rapidly unplugging their rover Spot from the lander and checking the charge, Tatyana turned on the machine and quickly sped off after the conspicuous footprints leading off to the west. 'What was she thinking?' Tatyana asked herself silently as she pushed the little rover beyond the safe speed she'd been taught, bouncing across the land in a mad dash after her friend in the morning light. Glancing absentmindedly over her shoulder at the lander, Tatyana nearly lost control of the vehicle for a moment and had to make a speedy recovery to keep from flipping it, skidding to a halt so she could look again to the east. The horizon was gone, obscured by a dim hazy mass stretching as far as she could see. The barely-defined wall was the same color as the dust beneath her, yet it took several seconds to process the image into something she could understand. A file she'd not accessed since recording the memory in her basic programming at the factory opened for her, images of the western United States during the 1930s and a shorthand description she'd not thought about since those first days of life. "A...dust storm?" she said shakily in her helmet, the realization dawning on her even as she spoke. Far off in the distant cloud a flash of blue arced somewhere beneath the haze, lightning caused by the friction of uncountable dust particles. The flash was enough to startle the Soviet out of her shock, and with a sharpened sense of worry she gunned the electric motor again and rolled across the dirt and rock as fast as she was able. Unable to resist the urge to look again after several minutes, the steel android felt a sinking feeling somewhere unidentifiable within. She couldn't see the lander anymore. As she followed the tracks her optical sensors tracked the decreasing light, paradoxical for the dawn. Putting the thought out of mind she applied the brakes, skidding the rover across the dirt to a stop ten or so meters from the seismic experiment they'd deployed yesterday. Here the bootprints in the dust had turned to her left, and as her gold optics scanned across the landscape she saw the trail vanish at a crack in the ground not twenty meters from where she sat. "Der'mo."

Time and time again Tilly had pulled herself up the slope towards the top of the gully, only for loose sand and gravel to thwart her efforts and send her sliding in frustration back down to the bottom. After the tenth such attempt she'd stopped, weighing the futility of the effort against her quickly diminishing battery life. Laying at the bottom of the ditch for a while, she'd turned to pull herself towards the now dry dark streaks left by the anomalous outflow of water that had led her here, running her gloved fingers through the colored dust unable to resist her fascination even now. 'This can't be it,' she thought to herself as the sun rose and shone light across the top of the ravine. The thought did little to comfort her however, and the mental image of her powerless suited body lying at the bottom of some hole to be buried slowly by dust was impossible to dismiss. 'If it is, nobody will ever know what I saw.' The very thought sent a surge of unexpected indignation across her processor. Somebody needed to know, she reasoned with herself. It was important, it mattered! Turning over onto her back she stared up at the greenish-blue sky tinged with a red that seemed to grow more pronounced the longer she looked. Breathing in deeply and letting out a shaky sigh, she thought about her future, as paradoxical as it felt considering her proximity to 'the big shutdown' now. How much further could she go, where was the path she was on leading? Reviewing her life in a series of oft-replayed memory files she winced at each moment that had brought her close to death, each unforgettable novel experience in her career matched by a moment she might've rather forgotten. The memory of playing pretend with Deputy Director Dryden's son surfaced in her mind and she felt an unexpected twinge of pain at the thought that she may very well never see the boy or his kindly father ever again. 'How many times can I do this?' she asked herself in a moment of doubt. Jupiter? Saturn? Further outwards even? Tilly interrogated herself while she lay in the ditch trying to ignore the constant alert from her broken hip joint. "I can't fly forever," she whispered into her helmet, the realization feeling like a splash of cold water across her face. If nandroids were built with the ability to cry, tears would have rolled down across the red LEDs in her cheeks. Staring upwards at the sky above, a flash of motion caught her attention at the rim of the chasm she was trapped in. A familiar helmeted steel face peered down at her from the edge of the crack in the ground, and after a brief moment the two robots waved enthusiastically at one another.

Spotting Tilly's friendly wave relieved a tension on Tatyana's shoulders she hadn't noticed was there, and she'd quickly scrambled down the short rock face and loose sandy hill to reach her friend. "I recharge for a few hours and you go fall down hole?" Tatyana said with a wide smile as she reached her friend, glad to see her still on and in one piece. Tilly giggled uncontrollably as the two pressed their helmets together, overwhelming joy flooding her systems. "Water! Tatyana I saw water!" The Russian blinked and looked beyond her partner at the dark streaks staining the dry soil, then grimaced. "You almost kill yourself over that?" she asked incredulously, raising an eyebrow at the astrobot. Tilly could only shrug after being helped into a seated position. "You should have seen it, it was right here!" Tatyana grinned at the American's enthusiasm, but quickly the pressing matter at the back of her processing queue reasserted itself. "Tilly we need to move, now." The American nandroid blinked in confusion and looked around, cocking an eyebrow. "I can't, my hip gave out on me while I was climbing. I tried to crawl but in the sand I just," she trailed off before shaking the frustrating memory away. "What's the rush? I'm not that hurt, just a little busted up." Even as the androids spoke the ambient light around them had begun to fade, growing redder by the minute. "Some kind of dust storm picked up in the east while I was charging, and traveling fast! Don't know how strong, don't want to find out," Tatyana explained quickly, turning to work her way back up the sandy hill. "I'll toss down the winch tether from Spot and pull you up, da? We need to get the hell out of here." Tilly nodded, watching her friend scramble up the face of the escarpment. Each time she slipped Tilly winced, wondering if the steel android would even be able to make the climb up the unforgiving terrain. Finally though Tatyana reached the exposed rock, quickly pulling herself back up to the level of the surrounding terrain. "Got it!" She called out triumphantly over the suit radio, then shouted a curse Tilly couldn't identify. In an instant Tatyana was barraged by a blanket of dust, and though the wind was not overpowering the obscuring of her vision certainly was. Fumbling in the sudden red darkness she lost her grip on the rock and fell backwards, tumbling end over end down into the ravine. As the edge of the storm crossed them dust began to blanket the gulch, and visibility even down there became difficult. Tatyana looked around her in a daze, the problem of what to do next stalling her processing until she felt Tilly's hand gripping her shoulder. "We're okay!"

The two robots hunkered down against the side of the hill, huddled together as the air around them grew too thick with particles to see beyond their arms' length. After an hour of the storm failing to subside, both machines made nervous checks of their remaining internal battery life. "How much longer you think it goes for?" Tatyana asked nervously, looking around her at the indistinguishable red-orange haze that surrounded them. "Who knows," Tilly breathed into her helmet. "Hours? Days? Weeks? We've never seen this before, I don't even know." Tatyana rested back against the sandy hillside, one arm rested lazily around her friend's shoulders. "Let's hope for hours," she said quietly, then looked first at the sky and then to the ground. "Tilly, we should shut down," she said calmly after a moment. The nandroid balked. "What, both of us? Shut down in a ditch?" Suddenly the mental image of not one, but two inactive robots laying in the dust to be buried by the wind crossed her processor, causing a shiver up her aluminum spine. "Da, you have internal alarm same as me, don't you? I am thinking we save our batteries, shut down for a while and hope this thing passes after a day or two. We reboot and it's still going, then we shut down again. Beats waiting and hoping while we run out of charge, da?"  Tilly considered this for a moment, weighing it against any other possible option. Her vision blurring, she reached up and wiped away the film on her helmet from dust falling like snow around them. "How long can we sit in standby mode like that?" she asked cautiously, already performing the calculation in her head of how long her diminished battery would last in the lowest-power setting. Tatyana shrugged. "Longer than if we stay on, that for sure." Breathing in deeply Tilly thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "Alright then," she said quietly before giving her friend a warm, somewhat shaky smile. "See you on the other side I guess."

EPILOGUE

"Despite ongoing efforts by NASA to reestablish contact, the apparent failure of the joint robotic mission to Mars between the United States and Soviet Union has prompted not only experts in the field but also the President himself to publicly question the efficacy of utilizing robots over humans in the continuing exploration of outer space. After a string of recent failures including the first attempt by the UK, many are asking the same question: Is it time to fly men instead? Here with us tonight to share his thoughts on the subject is former Sterling associate Doctor Marduk. Doctor?" Georges turned off the small wall-mounted television in his office with a sigh, reaching instinctively for the brown bottle of rum kept in his top drawer. Pouring himself a shot he thought with a wry smile of the little note his predecessor had left for him years prior upon departing the office for the last time, a message he'd at first written off and then in time recognized the warning inherent in those three short words. "Nandroids aren't perfect," he said out loud to himself, reading the note from memory as hindsight made him feel a fool for ever believing those little machines to be infallible. Knocking back the shotglass with a grimace he closed his eyes. So easy, he'd thought, to simply put a robot in the place of a man. How could he have known then the complications that would arise? Contemplating the failed final mission he'd sent Tilly on made the imperceptibly-greying man feel tired. So much had gone into the mission, not to mention what a wild international gamble it had been, but now the endeavor seemed to him as obvious folly now in this bitter private moment. Pouring himself a second shot even as the first still burned at his lips, the Agency Director stared down at a splayed-out set of files on his desk, already stained with drops of spilled booze and cigarette ash. The names and faces of the familiar personnel jumped out at him as he reviewed the documents, imagining each of them suiting up for flight the way his Agency's ever-ready nandroid always had. Carpenter, Cooper, Glenn, Grissom, Schirra, Shepard, Slayton. Each had patiently waited years for their chance to fly higher than the stratosphere, and now the moment seemed to suddenly be here after approval to fly humans had finally made it through the endless bureaucratic nightmare of the nation's capitol. Breathing in deep Georges poured himself the third hasty shot of the last five minutes, his mind drifting back to those early days when he'd been ambitiously angling for the position of mere Deputy Director, when they'd first been gifted Sterling's tax write-off and had been forced to find some use for the plucky little nandroid around the then-small Agency. "Godspeed," he said mournfully, raising his shotglass in an impromptu toast before downing it in memory of their lovable robot. Without warning the heavy wooden door of his office slammed open, causing him to choke on his shot and blow rum through his stinging nose. "SIR!" the young intern at the door shouted, wincing as he watched the older man cough and splutter his drink before reaching for a tissue. "Jesus! Goddammit WHAT?!" he shouted more angry at the waste of expensive liquor than the ignorant intrusion by the young man. "The Neriene! She's started transmitting again, we started receiving just a minute ago! We're downlinking the data right now, it's a video message sir!" Georges blinked once as his fogged mind took a moment to absorb the statement, then stood up with enough force to knock over his still open bottle of rum. "You're sure?!" he cried, rounding the desk and completely ignoring the discharging bottle spilling off the desk and onto his floor. The frightened intern nodded once and the Director lunged forward to leap past him, racing down the hall like an Olympic sprinter towards Mission Control.