Read Online Missing! by Brad Strickland, THOMAS E. FULLER - Free Book Online

wrong.”
    â€œSometimes it does,” Amanda said. “Sean, Jenny isn’t alone. Her team leader is Karl Henried, and he’s a level-headed man. She and Alex will have the others to look out for them. Alex is a level-headed young man, and Jenny’s no slouch herself. She knows what the dangers are and how to guard against them.”
    â€œThe people on Earth knew what the dangers were,” Sean returned. “They didn’t do such a great job of guarding.”
    â€œWell, we learn from their mistakes,” Amanda said. “I know you have a gift for spotting the weak places in plans, Sean. Is that what’s happening now, or is it just that you’re lonely and worried?”
    Sean had been wondering about that himself. “I just don’t know. I’m not even sure how I can recognizetrends. It’s a feeling more than anything else—the way you can bend a stick just so far and you have the feeling that if you try to bend it just a little more, it will snap. But it doesn’t work all the time, and sometimes it’s wrong. I hope it’s wrong now—or that it’s not working at all.”
    â€œI hope so too,” Amanda said.
    The next morning settled the question. Sean woke up with a sharp feeling of foreboding. He slipped to the foot of his bed and activated his computer, asking it for a weather satellite readout.
    The picture flicked to life immediately, live images showing Marsport and the area immediately around it: the southern slopes of Olympus Mons to the north, and the smooth, crater-pocked plain to the south. Sean expanded the view and moved it to the east and to the south.
    There. A blurry mass rose over part of the DaedaliaPlanum. Sean homed in on it. Not an atmospheric cloud, but a billow of dust. A storm was building—had built overnight—and now was gaining strength rapidly. Sean threw his clothes on and called Amanda. Her face appeared in his viewscreen. “What is it?”
    â€œDust storm,” Sean said. “Big one. Close to the pipeline route on Daedalia. Here, I’ll send you the picture.” Sean sent it, and on his own viewscreen he saw Amanda’s eyes widen in shock as she grasped the extent of the storm.
    â€œThe meteorology department said there was a chance of a storm, but they haven’t done their daily report yet. That
does
look bad. I’ll call the prep party in,” Amanda said. “It looks like it’s coming in from the north, across the lava flows. Maybe they can outrun it.”
    It was an electrical storm as well as a sandstorm. Bolts of intense lightning that dwarfed any on Earth shot from the growing, roiling dark cloud, slammed into the Martian surface, shattered and melted rock. Like a gigantic spider, the dark bloated body of the storm rose and stalked across the land on legs of lightning. The discharges interfered with radio communication, andfor over an hour Amanda tried without success to raise the advance base.
    Sean paced her office, too nervous to sit down, more and more worried as time went on and the storm intensified. Martian meteorologists had a classification system for storms. A ten was a global storm, a blinding, weeks-long rage of wind and sand that blanketed the whole planet. A one was a local storm, a dust devil that could cause minor damage. A two was ten times stronger than that, and a three was a hundred times stronger than a one.
    This one, the computer told Sean, had already built up to a four point five. If it had been an Earth hurricane, it would have ranked among the most powerful. A storm that size slamming into the east coast of the United States could rip apart a city the size of Washington.
    And if six campers were on the beach with no protection but tents—Sean couldn’t stand to think about it.
    When Amanda finally got through, the comm tech on the other end said that the station had lost contactwith the prep team. “We’re okay here, but