Chapter 1: Stranded

You know it’s serious when they schedule you for a live videoconference with both Flight and Capcom.

Well, a “live” videoconference anyway. That close to Mars, the lag-time was nearly 10 minutes. Let’s just say it wasn’t an interactive experience. But that’s exactly why I knew the affair was serious. For the heavy hitters to engage in such an inefficient form of communication? It signaled something major was up.

As soon as the link was active, Flight dove right in—her face displaying its usual gravity, only moreso. “MCT will follow up with details, but I wanted to sketch the big picture for you myself. The gist of it is this: a little over three months ago, we lost contact with Mars Ground Station. All efforts to reestablish communications have failed. Aerial photos show an explosion, with significant damage to the facility, including the entire comms array. The good news is we’ve detected activity at the site—leading us to believe there are survivors.”

Next, Capcom took over. He made a show of concern, but mostly followed the standard mission-control playbook of keeping us task-focused. “I’m sure this development comes as a shock to you, as it did to us. But we’ll be guiding you every step of the way. A new mission profile has already been developed. Your first priority will be to contact the Alpha-team crew, and render aid as necessary. Your second priority will be assessment. If the base is salvageable, we may be able to proceed with the mission. However, the likelier outcome is extraction. The Danae capsule is capable of transporting both you and Alpha team back to Earth, though it will be tight.”

We tried asking questions, but the transmission delay was cumbersome, and few answers seemed forthcoming. Once we’d terminated the link, Glover made it clear (in his rod-up-ass Marine Corps pilot way) that he, for one, was pissed. “Three months they’ve been sitting on this information, and only now thought to share it with us? When we’re days away from touchdown!?”

Sharon was more philosophical. “From their perspective, what was the point? We were halfway through the trip, with no way to turn around. And there wasn’t much they could do to prep us either, since no one has any idea what’s going on down there. I’m sure the psych consultants said it was better if we didn’t spend all those weeks fretting about it helplessly.”

Glover appeared to accept her logic—perhaps finding comfort in the notion that the higher-ups knew what they were doing. “Well,” he growled at last, “I did wonder why MCT was scheduling refresher lessons on how to patch up the comms gear...”

We spent the last few days of the voyage running scenarios and updating our training. The catastrophe on the ground hadn’t thrown us as badly as you might expect. We’d long since accepted that there were risks to what we were doing. And, we had reason to think the Alpha crew had survived, which was encouraging. Beyond that, we trusted our skills, and the organization behind us. We would meet whatever obstacles we encountered planet-side, and find a way to overcome them.

Still, I couldn’t shake a downbeat mood as we started in on the landing protocols. I’d spent 4 years of my life preparing, and 7 months jammed in this capsule, just to get to Mars. But unless we found the damage to be less than expected, MCT was fully prepared to pack us back into the ship and make a sprint for home. The thought of all the disappointment that would entail, not to mention the sheer waste, made my stomach churn.

There’s really nothing like the raw, fucking power of being strapped to the top of a few million pounds of rocket as it blasts you into space. We’d experienced that at Cape Canaveral less than a year before.

But now I learned that the reverse process had an uncanny magic of its own. Knowing that you’re about to splat into Mars at 25,000 miles an hour, and then feeling those same rockets smashing you into your seat, bleeding off all that speed, until you kiss up against the dusty red ground with the gentleness of a lover? Yeah, it was poignant.

After landing, we set right out for Mars Station, leaving Glover behind at the Danae capsule. As systems-engineer for Beta team, he’d be busy for the next few hours, conducting post-flight checks, and putting components into hibernation. While he labored, Sharon and I became human beings number four and five ever to set foot on the red planet (if you’re counting). We made a pact that we’d never tell which of us touched down first, and I’ve honored it ever since.

Sharon was the bio-med specialist. She had a full slate of scientific tasks planned for the next three years: examining the effects of cosmic radiation on us, testing different hydroponics techniques, assessing strains of lichen for terraforming. But first and foremost, Sharon was a physician, and ensuring the health and well-being of the crew was both her duty and her passion. Given that we didn’t know the status of Alpha team, there seemed every chance she’d be up to her chin in work when we arrived at the base.

As for me, I mostly tagged along as an extra pair of hands. We all had a fair bit of cross-training, but my primary specialty was exo-geology. As far as I was concerned, that meant I would be the one doing all the real work of the mission. However, it also meant that I was the least useful of the crew, from a purely functional perspective.

The rover maxed out at around 20 kph, but it beat schlepping in our pressure suits. As we bounced along, I took Sharon’s hand and squeezed it through two thick layers of glove. Trying to reassure myself, maybe, as much as her. Now that we were close to our goal, I found it unnerving to be creeping so very slowly into the unknown.

We’d seen pictures of the site, but from space, it had seemed remote and serene. Down at ground-level, the wreckage made a much more visceral impression—overturned storage tanks, cracked modules, and debris scattered everywhere. In the stark and glacially-evolving environment of Mars, the disaster looked like it could have happened just yesterday.

Mission control thought Hab-2 was the most likely section to still be functional, and they were right on the money. The airlock cycled without a hitch, and our readings indicated the air was entirely breathable.

Popping off my helmet, what struck me immediately was that it was hot. I mean hot, like a sauna. And then I was shaking hands with a tall burly man in a blue flight suit.

It was easy to recognize the guy as Andy Harris, systems engineer for Alpha team. He was visibly suffering from the oppressive atmosphere of the Hab. Even with sleeves rolled up, front zipped down to his navel, and nothing apparently on underneath, he was sweating profusely. Beyond that, however, he looked ready to wrestle a bear—and the glint of his darting eyes, the white gleam of his smile amidst a thick, black beard, and the firm grip of his hand told that the pleasure of seeing us had pushed all thoughts of discomfort from his mind.

“Damned if you two aren’t a welcome sight! Gotta give you props for punctuality too. Here you’ve just spent half-a-year hurtling through space, and you still land right on schedule, down to the minute!”

Sharon eyeballed him professionally, then glanced around the module. “You look well, Andy. I’ll have to give you a full workup, naturally. But are there any other survivors?”

A shadow darkened Andy’s face. “Foster and Cho didn’t make it. They were servicing the primary power converter when it blew.”

Sharon laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.

“Fuck...” I said lamely.

At an abstract level, the loss hit hard enough. That could have been us. Still, I suppose my reaction could be said to lack a certain pathos. Both of the fallen astronauts had been in different training cohorts than me, and I knew them only as casual acquaintances. I hadn’t seen either of them in a long time. It made the concrete emotional impact of the news more muted than it seemed like it ought to be.

Maybe that’s why the silence between Sharon, Andy, and me sagged so awkwardly. By the time we’d all shifted weight on our feet a couple times, I was starting to find it unbearable. “Yeah, well ... I guess we can hash over what happened later. Right now, someone probably ought to go get Glover. If we use the hauler, we can bring back a load of supplies...” I knew I was the logical one to go—Sharon was no doubt champing at the bit to give Andy a proper medical exam. But I didn’t make a move to put my helmet back on. For some reason, I wasn’t keen to leave her there alone with him.

“Tell you what,” the engineer said after the briefest hesitation. “I’ll play the chauffer, while you two get settled in here. It’ll give me the chance to send a message from the lander—let folks back home know I’m still kicking. Anyhow, I’ll enjoy the ride. I’ve gotten a little stir-crazy, stuck here by myself with no honey-do lists beaming down from MCT.”

I could see Sharon was reluctant to let her patient fly the nest, but I interjected before she could say anything. “Good plan, Andy. Then, when you’re back, you can debrief us all on the damage, and we’ll start assessing the options for repair.”

I was impatient to confab with Sharon as soon as the man was through the hatch. She was none too pleased with me, though. “You shouldn’t have sent him out like that Graeme. He’s coming off months of isolation. Must be suffering PTSD, if not worse. What Andy needs is a shoulder to cry on—not tasks to accomplish.”

I felt like she was missing the forest for the trees. Whereas Cho and Foster had been cyphers, I’d formed a distinct impression of Harris during the preceding years—and truthfully, I hadn’t much liked him. Oh, he’d been brilliant enough in training. There wasn’t any concrete failing of his I could point to. Still, the basic impression he’d made on me was that of a weak man. Undisciplined. Brittle somehow, deep down. I’d been startled when he not only made the cut, but been selected for the Alpha voyage. I guess the higher-ups saw him differently. But as for me, I was quite happy to be shipping out with Glover instead.

“I hear you, Sharon. But doesn’t anything about this strike you as squirrelly? I mean, why would the specialists be going out to service the fuel cells, while the engineer stayed inside? And I sure didn’t see the man shedding any tears, either. These are people he spent every single day with, for years. If you ask me, he was pretty damn cool.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, you know how macho you male flyboys pretend to be. I bet he’s locked all that grief away in a box, buried it down deep, and thrown away the key. However, it’s tough to provide a confirmed diagnosis, when you didn’t even give me the chance to examine him!”

I grunted noncommittally. Agree to disagree. “Well, you’ll get a crack at him soon enough. In the meantime, I suppose we ought to stow the cargo from the rover.”

She gestured toward the computer console. “You do it. I want to call up Foster’s medical log. I can at least get up to speed on the state of Andy’s mental and physical health prior to the accident.”

I latched my helmet and went back outside to haul crates. After 7 months in zero-g the gravity was a kick in the ass—but I had to count my blessings. Mars still dragged on me a lot less than Earth would have.

Sweaty as I was from my labors, it was almost worse to peel off the pressure suit after I’d finished, and find myself roasting in the oppressive atmosphere of the Hab again. “Have you had a look at the climate controls? What’s up with the temperature in here?”

Sharon’s reply was absent-minded. Her eyes stared off through the plexiglass viewport, thoughts apparently a million miles away. “It’s set to 20 degrees, but obviously something’s wrong. It must be more like 35 in here ... Graeme, what’s that?”

I followed her gaze. All I could see was rocky plains, bounded by a low line of rust-red hills—pretty much the same thing you saw whichever way you looked on Mars. And then I caught what she meant—a thin, black smudge smeared across the salmon-grey sky.

“Dust storm...?” she murmured, jaw trembling slightly.

“Fuck,” I said, “it’s smoke. In the direction of the lander.”

We spent the next couple of hours in dismal suspense. There was a brief surge of hope when the hauler slowly rumbled into view, along the track from the landing site. Then a sickening emotional free-fall when our binoculars revealed only one suited figure in the cab.

It was Harris, naturally, who clambered in through the airlock. His face was pale, eyes vacant. “This fucking mission is cursed. I’d just gotten the last of the supplies loaded when I saw something venting from the starboard motor. Coolant, fuel, I don’t know. And then it all went up. Blast knocked me flat, even in this atmosphere. Damn near punctured my suit.”

Sharon’s voice caught. “Glover?” she choked out at last.

Andy shook his head.

We couldn’t do anything after that. Couldn’t heat meals, or make up beds, or monitor the instruments. Harris slumped morosely in a chair at the control console with his eyes closed—waking or sleeping I couldn’t tell. Sharon and I crumpled into a corner together. I held her in my arms, and tried to dampen the sobs that wracked her frame for much of the night.

In the morning we organized a pathetic memorial service for Glover. We had no body, no pictures. We’d liked the man—felt close to him, in a comradely way—but now realized we didn’t really know much more about him than his professional resume. At the end of the day, he’d been an introverted, tight-lipped sort of guy. So much for the intimacy of sharing a space capsule for months on end...

And then? Then our training reasserted itself. A good astronaut was always working—always driving ahead, moving on to the next task, and never ever giving up. So that’s what we did.

It seemed natural to start with a council of war. Unfortunately, the meeting mostly served to emphasize the stark simplicity of our situation, and utter lack of options.

I kicked things off. “Andy, any chance Danae might be patched up enough to get us home?”

He chuckled bitterly. “Man, there’s bits of that ship spread over half of Pollard crater.”

There was a flaccid silence. “Right,” Sharon jumped in after a moment, “then we’re just going to have to stick it out until the folks back home can organize a rescue. And that’s going to take a while. What are our resources?”

Andy leaned back in his chair. “Well, there’s too much damage to the other modules to ever pressurize them again. We’re stuck with this.” He gestured around the Hab.

The space we inhabited was an equipment-crammed cylinder, featuring a couple of foldaway bunks, a tiny kitchen area, even tinier sanitary compartment, and a few computer terminals and workbenches. The sad fact was, it made a Manhattan studio apartment seem spacious. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I was looking forward to ‘spreading out’ after months in the flight-capsule. Before the disaster, Ground Station had boasted six modules—one Control, two Habs, one Rec, and two Scis. Now, that sounded like heaven. Things were going to be uncomfortably close for the foreseeable future...

“Pretty much every major system was damaged in the original blast,” Harris went on, “but I’ve cobbled together replacements. It’ll keep us alive.” He flashed a grin. “Hell, my seat-of-the-pants engineering’ll probably inspire a novel someday.”

I made a quick survey of the control panel. “Yeah, about that—I had a few questions. For starters, what’s up with the temperature?”

He grimaced. “Thing is, the climate system was designed for six modules. It’s overbuilt for one. You can’t stop it from generating heat, and it has to go somewhere. I’m bleeding off a lot, but there just isn’t enough heat-sink to take care of all of it ... I adapted to the sweat-box, though, and suggest you do the same.”

While he was talking, a garish red light had caught my eye. “Ok, I guess we can do that. To be honest, my more immediate concern is the oxygen levels. These readings don’t look so great.”

Rolling over in his chair, he pushed me aside and typed feverishly at the console for a minute. The red light blinked, and then switched to an amber color. “Nothing to worry about. As far as basic life-functions are concerned, we’re in pretty good shape. You guys were bringing a big stockpile of supplies for future missions, and I got most of it off before Danae went up. The water condenser’s topping 90% efficiency. And the oxy-extractor is fine too.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “What you did just then didn’t seem ‘fine’ to me.”

His response was defensive. “You the engineer, or me? Like I said, the extractor’s good. And so’s the atmosphere monitor. Only—there’s a fault in the feedback loop between them. Burnt-out circuit I can’t replace. So, after a while, the O2 levels start drifting. Gradually drawing down too low. Or building up too high. But it’s not a problem. I just gotta reset the system manually, every day or two.”