First, Last, Oldest, True

Happy New Year and welcome to The Sunday Morning Transport 2025, where we are looking ahead to many exciting stories on the horizon. We can’t quite believe we are turning four years old with this issue — and we want to thank you all for your support in helping us get here, and continue bringing you great stories by extraordinary writers.

January’s stories — by E. Catherine Tobler, Margaret Ronald, Marissa Lingen, and David Bowles — will all be free-to-read, and we hope that you’ll enjoy them and share them. However, it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

For our first story of 2025, we are delighted to welcome E. Catherine Tobler and her Martian dogsled team to the Transport, in a nail biting race to a distant polar ice cap.

~ Julian and Fran, January 5, 2025

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First, Last, Oldest, True

by E. Catherine Tobler

For Kevin, who helped me type again

The predawn sky over the southern Martian pole was not the holiest thing Lusa had seen, but it came close. The spill of stars and clouds across the dark expanse helped close out the incessant noise of her mind, the churning tumble of worry and unease, the low-level whisper of her own thoughts. Her tent possessed a transparent roof, allowing her to stare at the star riot until sleep claimed her. She was more familiar with northern hemisphere stars, so these southerners gave her new patterns to study, dissect, interpret. She did not name them, knowing someone already had, but she came to know their shapes, to look for the tree, the river, and the rose.

Trees, rivers, and roses on Mars were memories only, carried from another world entirely. Lusa had seen them in windblown snow, in the ancient river valleys near Schiaparelli Station, and in the craggy cliffsides. She found the lack of trees and water the strangest, but moving across such motionless landscapes gave her an even greater sense of motion. On Earth, she didn’t feel as though she were moving, whereas on Mars, she could fly, her sled and her dogs her choice of vehicle.

Every year, racers congregated on the southern pole of Mars for one such opportunity, the Planum Australe 400 km. Much as they did on Earth, mushers assembled a team and a packed sled to race their chosen path across the polar ice cap. Four hundred kilometers give or take, which was less than the longest Earth race but complicated by the Martian conditions. Carbon dioxide ice tended to crater, turning the snowfields into Swiss-cheesed mesas. The lesser gravity changed the behavior of dogs and sleds, too, suspending everyone and everything when they came away from the surface. Speed was possible, but it took longer to find and maintain it.

Lusa loved the challenge, the freedom. Her first year, she hadn’t finished the course, wrecking before she could. Her second, she had finished middle of the pack. And this, her third, would be her last; the journeys to and from Mars were taking their toll, and this year they’d proclaimed it: she would be the oldest woman to ever race the course. She had been the first woman to do it at all, but now she would be the oldest. Lusa understood it was time to yield the ice fields to someone else, but she just wanted to finish well.

Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t embarrass your dogs.

The challenges of Mars were what called to Lusa because Mars wasn’t content to sit like Earth was; Mars changed its motionless landscape every year. The ice was never the same, was never still despite the below-zero temps; Mars sculpted something new every time, be it iced terraces, towering scarps, or slick gullies that would swallow a person whole. Lusa did not pray to any god, but instead prayed to the Chasma Australe, that it would indeed devour her, even as she mapped her course to avoid its mouth.

She pinched the sky rose between her fingers and sat up in her tent, restless. Her thoughts were quiet, but she didn’t feel calm. In the safety of her suit, her skin prickled with anticipation. This was night one of her final race and she could not sleep. She laughed a little, finding herself ridiculous. After all this time and work, to feel exhilarated once again by it all was something unexpected and alien. Sleeping, they said, was for the weak, but Lusa couldn’t simply power through. Other mushers would try it and they would collapse, unable to finish. She had tried it her first time out, and early on it had worked well enough, but midway through, the body refused the process and passed out. Racers worried about everything, but chiefly about falling asleep and missing the entire race. Lusa would have ranked a dozen other items ahead of that worry.

Temperature, mostly—or supplies or runners or dogs, god if something happens to one or more of the dogs—when something happens—and it will, it simply will; this is how racing works here.

Lusa logged her downtime and relayed the transmission to Schiaparelli Station. Every time a musher rested or resumed their course, they checked in; if a musher didn’t check in, race officials tried to contact them, to be certain they were safe and on course. GPS could only tell them so much. Every team was outfitted with a transmitter, but transmitters were easily fallible in Martian conditions. So were mushers.

The tent and bedroll packed down easily, and stored along one side of the sled. Lusa didn’t have to pause to eat; her suit was still loaded with rations. She pressed one button on her arm rig to deploy a straw that tapped into a pack of sweet potatoes and lentils. She ate while she loaded the sled and powered the dogs up.

Up, up, up, c’mon, crew—good morning, good racing.

The team was never fully offline; the twelve dogs needed a continuous stream of energy to keep from freezing. When they were actually moving, Lusa’s suit hooked into the sled to transfer her body heat to them. Heat and cold were their worst enemies on Mars; too much of one or not enough of the other was a death sentence. Lusa didn’t expect to finish the race with all twelve dogs—some would be damaged in the course of the race, others would freeze up despite their high-tech innards. By rule, five had to finish. Once used by militaries and governments, the dogs had been discarded, rusting in junkyards until Lusa and others repurposed them.

She knew each dog by heart, every quirk and personality crease. Pika ran like they did not understand any lesser speed; Nellie would try to keep running even after being powered down for an evening. She loved each dog, no matter they were made of honeycombed aluminum and graphite. Each had a name, a personality, a body outfitted in faux fur that kept up appearances as well as helping insulate the metal skeleton. On the longest treks, Lusa could fool herself into thinking these dogs were flesh and blood; only, flesh and blood would not run so easily across the polar caps of Mars. Only her suit kept her from perishing on the surface, and even the race would push its limits. Radiation remained a concern as humanity moved into space. If the suit malfunctioned or was damaged in any way, she would likely be out of the race.

Won’t happen, can’t allow it.

The dogs roused at her command, pushing up from sitting. Jointed legs whirred into proper alignment as systems went from low power to full power. Each dog glowed a different color beneath its fur cloak; when the team was in motion, it looked to Lusa like an odd comet streaking across the Martian surface. She’d given them all hues of blue because they showed better on the polar caps for her and she could track their positions at a glance, without her HUD. Thin fog often obscured the pole landscape, vanishing items a handbreadth away.

Lusa talked to the dogs as she worked, old habit, her voice crackling from the suit mic straight into their mechanized ears. When she was latched into the sled, suit and sled working together like she and the dogs, those twelve dogs heeded her command, leaning into the run as one unit with twelve parts to breech the iced terraces before them. They were a glory, their weight and strength a constant pull on the gangline in her gloved hands. The loop heat pipes kept them all moving despite the frigid Martian day. Each dog was outfitted with LiDAR, constantly updating the map across Lusa’s HUD to ensure they were still on her chosen course. Deviations were part of the race, given weather and course conditions, but they’d do their best to keep true.

The lead dog, Tuktu, transmitted a warning—a sharp bark in Lusa’s ears and a scan of what the dog saw. Ahead on their route lay the trickiest bit of landscape they might encounter, a mesa-heavy region that was rough and pitted with deep craters given how the ice pack had sublimated. Carbon dioxide ice was more fickle than the water ice; it sublimated into gas, leaving gaping holes the sleds would struggle to navigate, but it was unavoidable in the southern pole—everyone in the race would find this terrain despite their mapping skills.

At the farthest edge of the mesas, Lusa saw what the dogs were narrowing in on: a wrecked sled. The sled had caught the layered edge of a crater, digging itself in even as it threatened to slide into the depression. The musher had not yet run up a flag indicating distress and was not transmitting an SOS, but Lusa could still see their basic information: Ricky Roberto, with an eight-dog team out of Nome, Alaska. It was his first Martian race, however. They were probably only fighting the inevitable; the crater and gravity would have their way. In the meantime, Lusa’s course would sweep wide of the wreck, and not for a good hour yet. The dogs plotted the wreck on her HUD, able to describe even the temporary trail the sled runners had carved in the carbon dioxide ice.

Shit—his first race, his first real emergency, maybe.

Lusa urged the dogs onward, keeping to their course. The wrecked sled shouldn’t be a complication, her map keeping them far outside the crater edge, but this was part of the challenge, too: every race was different, no course ran true. The ability to troubleshoot and adapt one’s course to the conditions was what would see her through. She hadn’t understood that the first time. Lusa kept the dogs running, working through a fresh route on her HUD as they neared the wreck.

As they moved into the sherbet sunrise, Lusa shifted some body heat from her suit to the sled runners. This in turn melted enough of the ice to allow the sled more speed as they came down a slight ridge. The sled rose off the ground a little and they hovered for a moment before settling back into the surface. Lusa laughed at the unexpected lift, but then saw the problem. Perhaps the musher before her had run into the same thing, but the ice here was melted into troughs, ice and trough spreading ahead of her like a massive fingerprint she could attempt to navigate. But the sled runner caught the side of a trough and could not melt a new path quickly enough. The sled jolted, jerking the dog team backward. Lusa slowed, but in the lesser gravity, nothing stopped. The sled bucked over four dogs before it all came to a stop, steam quickly dissipating in the air around them.

Lusa unhooked herself from the sled, stepping onto the crackled ice. A thin flurry of carbon dioxide snow lifted with every step she took. As on Earth, the snow on Mars had dozens of names, and Lusa could only be thankful this wasn’t the mashed potato variety. They were in enough trouble as it was.

The work to untangle sled and dogs was slow. Lusa began by unhitching the uninvolved dogs and guiding them away from the wreck. She powered the sled enough to ease it off the four others and immediately could see the four were too damaged to continue; the sled runners had burned through their footpads, rendering their wiring useless. The legs moved jerkily when Lusa tried to power them, kicking rather than smoothly striding. One by one, Lusa worked each damaged dog free, activating the GPS on the row of them when she’d finished. Other racers would be alerted to the hazard, and the dogs could be retrieved after the race was all said and done.

The other eight dogs had no opinion on those they’d had to set aside, but Lusa’s heart was heavy as she reset the team and sled. She couldn’t look back at the four she left, knowing them only as a small red dot on her HUD as she maneuvered the sled back onto her course. Only her course had changed again, drawing her closer to Ricky’s wrecked sled.

The going was rough over the troughs and mounds, and where they smoothed out, the terrain took a dip, giving way to rocks barely cloaked in ice and snow. The rising sun gave each one a little shadow and halo of light, assembling the oddest-looking chessboard Lusa had ever seen. The dogs were programmed to avoid such hazards, but Lusa had to guide them even so: the sled runners knocked into more than one rock on the way through, leaving Lusa tensed with the expectation of the next jolt. When at last the rocks thinned out, she exhaled through her nose and forced her shoulders down from her ears.

“Tuktu, scan that wreck,” she said, and an updated image flooded across her HUD from the lead dog.

The wrecked sled was moving deeper into the crater wall, whether from the ice sublimating under sunrise or from the musher’s attempts to move the rig. Maybe both. It looked like two dogs had been lost to the crater, perhaps unhooked as a last measure by the musher.

Close enough now, Lusa attempted to raise the musher on her comm. “Ricky Roberto, this is Lusa Reed with a team of eight coming up on your six. Do you copy?”

The comm channel was silent but for the faintest thread of hiss Lusa always wondered if she was imagining. Something was always better than utter nothing.

She narrowed her scans on the sled and found Ricky’s radio rig; the transmitter had shorted out. He might’ve set to work on that, but he was too busy trying to keep his rig from sliding into the crater.

Lusa urged her team on, keeping them steady and true. They would come up behind Ricky’s sled but keep some distance off, so as to not stress the ice pack further. Lusa felt bad enough as it was when she got unhooked from her sled and began to approach. Her comm crackled then, Ricky’s suit comm having a shorter range than his sled rig. Ricky’s voice poured into her headset.

“Stay back,” he warned in a Southern drawl. “The ice here as about as stable as a willow in the wind. Only thing you’re doing here is risking your own rig and dogs. Best get on so you finish, Lusa Reed. Oldest lady to race, huh? Don’t look so old.” He canted his head.

The ice was cracked, but the whole surface of Mars was cracked in some way. Spring would bring more cracks. This close, Lusa could see how the sled was caught; the runner had bent against a half-hidden rock. The dogs were powered down but still hummed a little, pulling the excess heat from his suit as they waited. Ricky looked up, and his helmet was a convex mirror like her own; she could see her reflection and nothing of his face.

Don’t look so old—he’s not seeing me, is only seeing his own reflection, and the whole of Mars behind me.

She knew if she stayed, she was done for. No musher could finish with another; it was a solo event, musher and dogs across the polar cap. And now Ricky Roberto. The breath moved out of Lusa, through her suit filters. I just wanted to finish well. Well, what’s better than helping someone out of a pit? If someone had helped me on my first race . . . Well.

“Willows got deep roots,” Lusa returned.

But the roots didn’t hold so well. The ice cracked beneath Lusa’s boots, and Ricky, kneeling in the middle of his dogs, flailed. There was no time for thinking, only acting. Lusa lunged for Ricky, but Ricky lunged for his dogs. In the tangle of lines and machines, Ricky was an unlikely hub, doing nothing to straighten the mess. Two of the dogs still lashed to the sled tumbled over the crater edge. They hung from the lines wrapped around Ricky’s legs. The dogs bumped against the crater wall, jerking Ricky and Lusa down.

“Well, this ain’t gonna hold,” Ricky said, tightening his grip on Lusa’s arm. He dug the sharp tips of his boots into the crater wall, but the ice crackled and shattered. Lusa kneeled in the ice, watching little bits chip loose between them and sublimate in the low-pressure air. “Let me go; we’ll just slide down. Can camp until a crew gets out for rescue. I can’t finish, not with that runner.”

Rescue would be there within the hour, Lusa knew. She looked back at Ricky’s sled, its hunched weight lodged against the crater edge the only thing really stabilizing them.

“Ricky, we’ve got to let the dogs go.” She wasn’t surprised he hadn’t disconnected them already—it was one of the first rules of wrecks, disengage the team from the load—but how many could do that? To plenty of people, the dogs weren’t real, but neither were they entirely lifeless. Out here, under the spreading sky, Lusa understood the dogs were the only company a racer had.

“No,” Ricky ground out.

“I can’t haul you both up,” Lusa said, the weight already beginning to strain her arm. “You aren’t going to finish at the bottom of a crater.”

“Neither will my dogs.”

And yet, as they hung there, Ricky was already slipping from Lusa’s grip. “Ricky, I can’t—”

Lusa strained backward, unable to budge Ricky and the weight of the dogs. The dogs at her back, Ricky’s final four, were still powered down and she couldn’t control them.

“Ricky, disengage the two. I’m not leaving you at the bottom of a crater,” she said, then tongued her control to talk to her dogs. Via voice she freed Tuktu, Mila, and Buck and maneuvered them behind her, around the huddled forms of Ricky’s dogs. Tuktu chomped the safety line dangling from the back of Lusa’s suit in his mouth and dug his footpads into the ice. An anchor, but not a permanent one. Lusa tongued her comm back to Ricky.

“Ricky, release the dogs.”

For a long moment, they hung there, only their breaths moving across the comm line. Then the dogs were sliding into the dark, icy mouth of the crater. The weight on Lusa’s shoulders eased, and Ricky edged up the ice wall, bit by bit, until he flopped beside her and the dogs, panting.

“Come on.” Lusa thumped him on his arm. “Let’s get this team back up.”

“Only four,” he whispered.

“Just what I had to set aside earlier. That’s the good math. Now, come on.”

Lusa’s body shook the entire time they worked. She didn’t know if she was angry with herself or at Mars, and then she was laughing, because it wasn’t anger, it was elation. She looked up at the sky, the deepening sherbet sky, and said a silent thank-you to the tree, the river, and the rose. How she felt here was everything—under the Martian sky, she felt true.

“If you take me,” Ricky said, “your finish won’t count. I can camp here, Lusa.”

She looked up from the melded lines of their teams and shook her head. “You can, but do you want to?” She stood and moved toward her sled. “My finish will count—to me, if no one else. Let’s pack your tent, put a GPS on your dogs, and get going. We’ve got a long route ahead.” She sent an update to Schiaparelli Station and waited for them to acknowledge.

The sled moved differently with two mushers, but they worked well together, the dogs a good blend that kept them moving steadily across the polar ice. The sled came down a little more quickly every time they sailed over a ridge, their combined weights working more efficiently in the lower gravity. Lusa wondered if a paired race would be possible, her mind refusing in the end to consider this her last journey. One more, she thought. Maybe one more. I’d still be the oldest. . . .

When they crossed the finish line three days later, it was not the holiest thing Lusa had seen, but it came close.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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E. Catherine Tobler’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex Magazine, and others. Her short fiction has been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Nebula Award. Her editorial work at Shimmer and The Deadlands has made her a finalist for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award.

“First, Last, Oldest, True,” © E. Catherine Tobler, 2025.

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