The descent and SETI teams were probably recovering in their tiny cabins. She cleared some trash on the kitchen board—litterbugs everywhere!—then got coaxed by the coffee aroma, and curled into a booth with her cup. This one had a sliding door for privacy and she drew it closed. After the trauma of the vent descent, this felt cozy. She idly watched the “viewports” that were in fact screens showing external vistas. (In her own cabin, she’d set the screen to a no-sound Hawaiian beach with crashing surf; no point in staring at red sand all day.)

One was a distant perspective on the “hab”—leftover Mars pioneer lingo for habitat. It stood amid a clutter of vehicles beside the power reactor, a fat cylinder with big tubes and power lines spraying out radially. A thick apron of bagged dirt cloaked the hab, like a wraparound sand dune. Her briefing had pointed out that the maximum angle that a dune could assume was independent of the local gravity, so this looked like dunes on Earth. The angle depended only on the dirt’s coefficient of friction, which for Rachel was far too much information. The habitat was another tall cylinder, most of its rooms pie-shaped. Though a meter of Martian regolith buffered the outside, they had water-filled walls as an added radiation shield. All to let them forget for a while how dangerous Mars was.

Distraction psychology was everything here, she had learned in the week since arrival. That meant heating the water jacket with their nuclear reactor waste therms, so everything was pleasantly warm to the touch. The walls radiated a comfortable reassurance that the stinging, hostile world outside could have no effect here. Still, indoors on Mars was like being in a luxury gulag. The Siberia outside was never far from mind.

The entire base devoted to studying the Marsmat was minimal. Thus the older styles, minimizing wastes, so as not to disturb the overlay above the Marsmat caverns. But it meant minimal staff and help for visitors, too. Even visiting birdy aliens.

Abruptly the door slid back. “Mind?” Zuminski asked, and sat down without hesitation. He slid the screen back into place, insulating them from anyone who came into the mess. “I want to talk, before we do mission review.”

“Uh, okay.” So much for my little private, comforting interlude….

With his surprisingly quick, big hands, Zuminski set in front of himself a bottle of tequila, a salt shaker, a thick shot glass, and a saucer of lime slices. “I always give myself celebration, if had a rough descent.” He sipped from the shot glass without expression as she blinked at this. She knew the Mars style had a long tradition of hard-drinking, abrupt, rugged types, but… this early in the day? The mess still smelled of breakfast.

Stage is set, she thought. But what’s the script?

She said carefully, “I’m trying to understand what happened. Have you seen anything like that flooding before?”

He raised his eyebrows, turned his lips down in mock puzzlement. “Never. New phenom, it is.”