Read Online Champion of Mars by Guy Haley - Free Book Online

places, and provided he kept wallside, he was unlikely to come to any mischief if he did come off the quad. And he hardly ever came off his quad. He kept a firm eye on his radar map, which should give him a few seconds of warning should the road be blocked anywhere.
    “Jonah, you really should return home. Your grandmother will be worried.”
    “I left her a note, didn’t I?”
    “I hardly think that will make her feel better.”
    “I’m not doing anything wrong. Besides, I told her exactly where I am going.”
    “She offered to take you with everyone else. The safe way.”
    “Cybele, this is fun! Do you understand?”
    There was a pause. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I do.”
    And she must have been enjoying the ride too, because she shut up.
    Half an hour later, they stopped for a break. Jonah took in the view, captured it on his implant. The sky was split into bars of pink, blue, and violet. The river was a braid of glittering strands, worming their way out of the Noctis Labyrinth to the west. Plantations of genegineered pines were laid out like chess squares around it. The highway was a hair-thin streak, the headlamps of cars candle flames crawling along it. Spurs of rock and outcrops on the canyon walls made the Valles a geometric puzzle of blacks and pinks. The opposite side was lost in the haze of Mars’ ever-present dust. The view was something else; not what he was going up for, but a great bonus. Best of all, the suns were coming up.
    He told his implant to film. “Cybele, could you compensate for me? I don’t want any camera wobble on this.”
    “Compensating,” said the AI.
    The sun crept over the lip of the canyon, little more than a bloated star. He filmed it and panned his head round slowly, until he was facing away from it. In the sky opposite the sun, a pulsed twinkle flashed strongly as the mirror-sat twitched its reflectors into position. Jonah was particularly pleased with the lens flare, an effect he had the implant exaggerate. A beam of concentrated sunlight swept across the landscape like a sword stroke, bringing brief light and swift shadow. The mirror satellite oriented itself, focussing a slanting ray of sunshine back down the canyon. Jonah followed the light. It ended in a broad oval, glittering off the roofs and panels of Canyon City thirty kilometres away, turning the twin lakes bracketing the settlement into brilliant white coins.
    It was hardly a sprawling metropolis, not like the places Jonah had seen in holos of Earth. “But it’s home,” he said, mimicking the tones of his teachers.
    He grinned. Today he felt happy. The last few years had been rough, but he was coming into himself, beginning to feel comfortable in his skin. He was growing up. It was hard to deny.
    He shut the camera in his head off.
    Up here, they were back in signal, but he ignored the multiple messages from his grandmother, sending her one back saying he’d be back in the morning, and not to worry.
    No chance of that, he thought.
    She wouldn’t be happy about this trip. Neither would the city marshal, but what was the point of one-man shelters if you never got to use them? He was packing it all into this trip – dangerous ride and overnight bivouac – because he was going to be grounded for, like, years when he got back down.
    He ate, taking quick little bites in between breaths of air from his mask. The air was so thin he felt like there was nothing going into his lungs, no matter how hard he sucked it in, and the dearth of oxygen made his head giddy and filled his vision with flashing spots. Down there, in the Valles, in the caves and buildings of Canyon City, there was just about enough oxygen, and both pressure and O-content struggled up a little higher every year. But up on the very lip of the wide open spaces of Mars, the TF programme had made so little difference yet as to be negligible.
    “I wish I didn’t have to wear this stupid mask,” he said.
    “In about a hundred years time, you will not