He shook his head and smiled, tapping his own ears with a finger. Then he wrote on his slate, “Compressible fluids — a lot to learn.” He added with a rueful grimace, “Some honeymoon. I love you!”

With little ceremony, and not much in the way of clothing left to remove, we celebrated still being alive.

We checked in with the satcoms to tell everybody we had survived and could take care of ourselves. Resources were strained from Arcadia to Mariner Valley — the surge had sheared into three parts crossing the Tharsis volcanoes, and twenty-three stations had been hit by the three-headed monster. There were casualties — seven dead, hundreds injured. Even UMS had suffered damage.

Ilya and I inspected the lab from outside, elevating the tires again and cutting the tie-downs. The foils and tarps had protected it against most of the boulders flung by the surge. Minor damage could be fixed by patches.

We decided to collect what specimens we could from the shed’s remains and drive the lab back to Olympus Station. Replacing our suit tanks and purifiers, we walked west from the lab several dozen meters.

Ilya was somber. My tinnitus had passed but hearing was still difficult — his voice in my com was a barely understandable buzz. “Looks as if we’ve lost the cyst,” he said. The shed itself was nowhere to be found — it might have blown clear to Tharsis by now. But it would undoubtedly have spilled its heavy contents.

I looked up through the thinning curtains of dust. The sky peeking through the gray seemed greenish. I had never seen that color before. I pointed it out to Ilya. He frowned, looked back at the lab, then set his jaw and said we should keep searching.

The air temperature hovered just above zero. It should have been thirty or forty below at this latitude, at this time of the year.

My ecstasy was fading rapidly. “Please,” I muttered. “Enough. I’m not an adventurous woman.”

“What?” Ilya asked.

“It’s hot out here and I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I,” Ilya said. “But I don’t think it’s dangerous. There haven’t been any more warnings.”

“Maybe something local is brewing,” I said. “Everyone knows weird weather lives in the sulci.”

He vaulted across a wind-exposed boulder and picked up a pale brown cylindrical rock. “One of our core specimens. Maybe the shed dumped its load here.”

“I think we should go back.”

Ilya stood and frowned deeply, caught between wanting to please me and a powerful need to find something, anything, of the broken cyst and the other specimens. Suddenly, I regretted being such a coward. “But let’s look a little longer.”

“Just a few more minutes,” he agreed. I followed him to the edge of a canyon. A hundred meters below, fine dust drifted like a river through the canyon bottom. Gray dust mixed with, swirls of ochre and red, immiscible fluids, Jovian; I had never seen anything like it. Ilya kneeled and I squatted beside him.

“If they fell down there — ” he said, and shook his head. Our suits were covered with clinging gray dust; the suck and destat in the lab might not be able to remove enough to keep it from getting into the recycling systems, into our skin. I imagined smear rashes itching all night long.

Something fogged the outside of my face-plate. I reached up to wipe it. A muddy streak formed under my touch. I swore and removed a static rag from my waist pack. The rag did not work. I could hardly see.

“The dust is wet,” I said.

“Can’t be. There’s not enough pressure,” Ilya said. He looked at my suit and streaked the muck on my arm with one finger, then examined the finger. “You’re right. You’re wet. Am I?”

His face plate had fogged as well. I touched his helmet. “Yeah,” I said.

“Jesus. Just a few more minutes,” he pleaded. Over the canyon, afternoon sun broke through clouds of dust. Green-tinted rays swept across the rugged furrows of the sulci, casting the landscape in a ghoulish light interrupted by deep shadows.

We backed away from the rubble at the edge of the canyon. Ilya kicked wind-exposed rocks aside and slogged through drifts of familiar red smear and the superfine gray dust. There was no sizzle anywhere. It had been mixed with unradiated clays and flopsand. Years might pass before ultraviolet could convert the surface to crackly sizzle again.

“The surge must have uncovered an ice aquifer nearby. Pebble saltation blasted it,” Ilya said. “This gray stuff must be ice dust, and down here, it’s just warm enough to melt — ”

He stopped and gave out a groan. “Up there,” he said, pointing to the top of a low ridge. A jagged lump of rock about a meter wide presented a flash of crystal in the broken rays of afternoon sun. We climbed.

I looked back over my shoulder at the lab, half a kilometer away. My back muscles tensed with a red rabbit’s instinct to run and hide. The surge was gone, but wet dust was completely outside my experience. We might sink into a depression and drown. I had no idea how our filters and seals would function in water.

Ilya reached the top of the ridge first. He knelt before the exposed lump of rock. “Is it the cyst?” I asked.

He did not answer. I stood behind him and peered at the shiny exposed face. It was indeed part of a cyst — very likely the cyst that had tumbled from the shed. It lay half-buried in a hole filled with gray dust. The intricate patterns of quartz and embedded zinc clays seemed less distinct, blurred; I thought it might be the weird light. But where the fragment of cyst met the pool of dust, a thick gelatinous layer spilled and churned.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Something in suspension,” Ilya suggested. He reached out to touch the gelatinous material. It clung to his glove.

“Snail spit,” I said.

“Genuine grade-A slime,” Ilya agreed, lifting his glove.

“Why doesn’t it dry out?” I asked.

He looked at me, forehead pale, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. I could hear his rapid breathing over the com. “There’s water all around. The gray dust is ice and clays, and the clays are keeping the ice from sublimating. But the temperature is high enough that the ice melts, and the cyst can get at the moisture. It’s the right mix. It has what it wants.”

The slime grew thicker as we watched. Within, white streaks formed little lacework doilies.

“How much do you think this masses?” he asked, measuring the fragment with his arms.

“Maybe a quarter ton,” I said.

“We couldn’t carry it far. The lab might roll close enough, we could get the strongest arbeiter up here…”

I removed my slate and set it for visual record.

“Good thinking,” Ilya said. He put a sample of the slime into a vial, capturing parts of the lacework as well.

“Do you think it’s — ” I began to ask.

“Don’t even say it,” he warned. “Whatever it is, it’s a tricking wonder.” He sounded like a little boy with a new toy.

I looked up at the curtains of gray, the sun dazzling through the clouds. This was as close as Mars could get to rain.

“It’s just a fragment,” Ilya said, trying to rock the piece of cyst in its cradle of pebbles and dust. “What can a fragment make? The whole ecos?”

He passed me the vial. As he took more samples, I stared at the lacework within the captured fluid. It measured no more than two centimeters across, as fine as gossamer. I had no idea what it was — a bit of cellular skeleton, a template for cytoplasm, a seed, an egg, a tiny little baby.

Perhaps a Martian.

Within two days of returning to Olympus Station, we were famous. Journals on LitVid and ex nets across the Triple lauded us for making an epochal discovery — the first viable, non-Terrestrial life discovered in our Solar System. That we had made the discovery on our honeymoon only threw petrol on the celebrity fires.

The discovery was more than a little embarrassing to the Martian science community. Ilya was a fossil hunter and areologist, a digger, hardly trained in biochemistry at all; there was considerable resentment, even skepticism, at first — that we should have been in the right place, at the right time, to witness a cyst bloom…