Free Warrior Chronicles 2: Warrior's Blood by Shawn Jones Page B

where the water is. Right between Tharsis and Amazonis. It’s about five-hundred meters down. I think it’s liquid, based on projected temperatures at that depth, but I can’t be sure. It’s much more accessible than the water at the northern polar cap. There, the environment prevents us from being able to settle. And the annular cloud storm is too harsh for colony modules to last very long.” The man looked at Addison hopefully.
     
    “How much water do you think is there?” Cort asked.
     
    “I don’t think there is water there. I know it is. And I know it’s a lot. There are only two things I don’t know. Number one, as I’ve mentioned, is that I don’t know if it’s frozen or solid. Number two is that I don’t know if it’s fresh or mineralized, such as salt water. Although if it is mineralized, that would be a huge boon for us. We need the salt as much as we do the water.”
     
    “How much?” Cort asked again.
     
    “The micro satellites indicate it could be as much as say, oh maybe the Memorial Sea back on Earth. But I could be off by as much as thirteen percent. How soon can I test drill?” Black asked.
     
    “Patience, Wynn,” Cort said to the consternation of the bent little man. “It’s not like Earth here. If you strike a gusher, most of it will evaporate off and bleed into space. Let’s get Kim Point in on this. Once she has a way to contain it if necessary, then you can drill. But not before, okay?”
     
    “Oh, yes. Of course. I hadn’t considered that. And it could very well be under pressure. I believe it was originally contained by an eruption of Mons Olympus. That is, I don’t think it’s groundwater. I think it’s truly an underground sea. If it was liquid at that time, but is frozen now, it may be under stress. So we do need a containment system.” Wynn looked back at his map.
     
    Rhodes had been silent during their conversation, but he spoke now. “Cort, if this is right, it changes everything. Everything .”
     
    Cort reached down and scratched Zandra’s head. “Yes it does, Chief. It changes all of our resource needs. Wynn, you probably just made the whole planet’s day. Nice work. Let’s call Kim. Then we need to have a meeting of the administrators.”
     
    --
     
    After the administration meeting, Kim Point and Kay Gaines joined Addison and Rhodes in the wolf park. It was named after John Wills and every afternoon, the two ladies and their wolves joined Cort and Zandra there. Larger than the first open area at Aeolis, the park was nearly one hundred meters square with a Formvar-M ceiling that, combined with Mars red sky, gave the park a feeling of perpetual dusk. It had four evenly space pillars to take part of its weight off the surrounding colony modules, and each pillar was designed to look like a tree trunk. There were also more than thirty live trees arranged in a copse at the center of the park. At one end of the copse was a small pond the animals swam and played in. the grass was sparse and unkempt in keeping with the preferred habitat of the wolves. There were several small sitting areas around the park, large and small, and there were usually a dozen or so colonists lounging or watching their wolves play.
     
    Kim’s wolf was the youngest of the three and only half the size of most of the animals in the park. Kim had named him Coke because of his unusually dark gray fur. The two older wolves were trying to rest while Coke harassed them. Kim was mostly thinking out loud when she said, “If Wynn is right, and there is water, containing it won’t be a problem. We can consider storing it on the surface, but I recommend we pipe it directly to the colony sites. It’s more work, but will use fewer resources. I also recommend we put a small occupied station near each well site so we always have someone on hand in case of a problem. And with one well site for each colony site, we also have better redundancy if something does go wrong.”
     
    Kay asked,