Jesús KeeferDozens of remote experimental substations lay scattered across the top of the Spine, like a collection of mad-scientist apparatus exposed to the greenish sky.
Jesús Keefer and his companions craned forward to peer out Schiaparelli’s wide front windowport as Bruce Vickery, their tour guide, brought the rover to a halt. Moving at about fifteen miles per hour even with the vehicle’s terrain-gripping mobile legs, Vickery had spent part of the morning toiling along the rugged slope. The crumbling rock looked as if it barely held together in the low gravity.
Finally they reached the top, emerging from the morning shadows into the bright wash of light, where the shielded mound of Lowell Base’s small power reactor steamed and hissed in the frigid air. To Keefer, the reactor mound loo
