It was no easy task hauling these giants across the rubble to the big holding tanks near their habitats, but they needed to do it, because after they were drained into the holding tanks they could be turned on again.  Just that afternoon another group had gotten one emptied out and turned back on, and the low hum of its jets could be heard everywhere, in a helmet or a habitat.

Nadia and Samantha's miner was more stubborn; in the whole afternoon they only managed to haul it a hundred meters, and they had to use the bulldozer attachment  to scrape a rough road for it all the way.  Just before sunset they returned through the lock into the habitat, their hands cold and aching with fatique.  They stripped down to their dust-caked underwear and went straight to the kitchen, ravenous once more; Vlad estimated they were each burning about six thousand calories a day.  They cooked and gulped down rehydrated pasta, nearly scalding their partially-thawed fingers on their trays.  Only when they had finished eating did they go to the women's changing room and start trying to clean themselves up, sponging down with hot water, changing into clean jumpers.  "It's going to be hard to keep our clothes clean, that dust even gets through the wristlocks, and the waist zippers are like open holes."  "Well yeah, those fines are micron-sized!  We're going to have worse trouble from it than dirty clothes, I can tell you that.  It's going to be getting into everything, our lungs, our blood, our brains. . . ."

"That's life on Mars."  This was already a popular refrain, used whenever they encountered a problem, especially an intractable one.

On some days after dinner there were a couple hours of sunlight left, and Nadia, restless, would sometimes go back outside.  Often she spent the time wandering around the crates that had been hauled to base that day, and over time she assembled a personal tool kit, feeling like a kid in a candy store.  Years in the Siberian power industry had given her a reverence for good tools, she had suffered brutally from the lack of them.  Everything in north Yakut had been built on permafrost, and the platforms sank unevenly in the summer, and were buried in ice in the winter, and parts for construction had come from all over the world, heavy machinery from Switzerland and Sweden, drills from America, reactors from the Ukraine, plus a lot of old scavenged Soviet stuff, some of it good, some indescribably shoddy, but all of it unmatched-some of it even built in inches-so that they had had to improvise constantly, building oil wells out of ice and string, knocking together nuclear reactors that made Chernobyl look like a Swiss watch.  And every desperate day's work accomplished with a collection of tools that would have made a tinker weep.