The Last Dance

by Martin L Shoemaker

  “Negative. As big as the blast was, the lander was still boosting faster. She was rocked, but she kept going.”

  “Rocked? Any damage?”

  “We can’t tell yet. The trajectory’s a little unsteady, so maybe. Maxwell and I are tracking her approach to the Bradbury. The team there can check her out when she docks.”

  I swallowed, and I realized that my throat was dry. I turned my head in my helmet, found my straw, and bit the end to open the bite valve. I sucked at the straw, but I got nothing. “Damn.”

  “Problem, Smith?”

  “No water, Captain. I don’t understand, my drink bag should have plenty of water.”

  “It shows empty on your readouts. Maybe when the lift fell on you, the bag burst. Now leave me alone, Ensign, I have to follow this approach.”

  I tried to pull myself free of the sloping mound of sand. Meanwhile I needed a distraction. “Can I listen in, Captain?”

  The captain hesitated, then he answered, “All right. But don’t chatter in my ear. I’ve got to keep an eye on Deece.”

  He cut me into the command loop, and I heard Chief Maxwell arguing with the AI. “—angle’s too wide, Deece. Weaver, got those cabins sealed yet? We may have a collision! Deece, you need to boost higher.”

  Deece’s calm voice contrasted with Max’s tension. “All models indicate this approach vector is within acceptable parameters.”

  Captain Aames cut in. “Damn it, Deece, boost already.”

  “Yes, Captain. Boosting.”

  I couldn’t see the approach readouts, but Max and the captain could. Max responded. “Too late, Deece, you’re too fast. Abort.”

  “Models indicate—”

  Max didn’t wait for her to finish. “Abort! Captain, request control.”

  “Deece, turn control over to Chief Maxwell.”

  Deece’s calm response gave me a chill. “I cannot do that, Captain.”

  Max’s voice grew louder. “She’s definitely too fast, Captain.”

  Aames’s voice was coldly precise. “Deece, that’s an order.”

  Deece replied, “Captain, you are under stress due to the trapped crew. Chief Maxwell is also under emotional stress. Psychological models indicate that your judgment is compromised. I am most competent to make this approach.”

  The captain answered, “This is Captain Nicolau Aames. Override sequence: one; code: one-one-A. Transfer control.”

  “Got it, Captain!” Max shouted. “All hands, brace for impact. Trying to pull away. Thirty meters, seven meters per second . . . Twenty, six-point-three . . . Ten, six-point-oh . . . Five . . .”

  A horrible feedback squeal came over the comm, and then silence. I held my breath, stunned.

  But then the silence broke. Static filled my ears, and then went down without completely going away. Through the static, Captain Aames was calling, “Max . . . Max, respond . . . Max, Weaver . . . Bradbury, Aames here, anyone respond.”

  There was only more static. As I listened for a reply, I managed to dig out enough sand below me that I was suddenly free, sliding slowly on my belly to the floor. I lightly rose to my feet and inspected my suit for scrapes, tears, or other damage. Eventually the captain stopped calling, and the static was quiet enough that I could hear Pagnotto softly moaning on the local channel. I stepped carefully around fallen tiles, plus one light panel that swung on a cable almost reaching to the floor. I had to be careful in the piles of sand: several times I felt debris beneath my boots, chunks of tile and rock and loose parts, large enough to trip me if I stepped on them wrong. I walked over to Elvio to check his suit diagnostics. “Captain, why’s the comm so staticky?”

  “Think, Smith, check your band. Your comm system automatically switched from SHF relay off the Bradbury to low-frequency ground wave.”

  “But that would mean . . . Sir, it’s antenna failure, it can’t be any more than that. Six meters per second isn’t that fast.”

  “Maybe.” But the captain sounded doubtful. “It depends on where lander 2 hit. My last reading before the comms cut off was an emergency alert from engineering, a fragment of a data packet. My suit computer is trying to reconstruct it.”

  Captain Aames fell silent, and I let him work while I saw to Pagnotto. Judging by his suit readings, he was conscious, but his eyes were closed. “How ya doing, Elvio?”

  His eyes flickered open, but it took several seconds for them to focus through his visor. “I have felt better, Ensign. My head aches, my neck throbs, and a thousand pins stab my feet. And also, ho vomitato.”

  I checked Elvio’s vomit bag. It was half-full, and I also saw some around his mouth and neck. “Heh. You look like I did after that pub crawl in Munich. Why aren’t you in the shelter? We could get your helmet off and clean you up.”

  But my attempt to lighten his mood was a misfire. “I do not wish to see surgery.”

  Of course. Gale and Carver were in the shelter, amputating Van der Ven’s leg. I silently agreed: we could wait outside awhile. I dug further into Elvio’s suit diagnostics. The suit had diagnosed concussion, cervical acceleration-deceleration, but no signs of hematoma. That last was a small comfort, at least: I didn’t relish the idea of catheterizing his brain. He tried to bear up under the pain, but he still moaned repeatedly.

  The suit comp recommended sedation and rest, but emergency protocols had kicked in. In an emergency, an injured crewman might still do vital work, while an unconscious crewman was just one more problem. So the comp flashed a question: Sedate? YES or NO.

  I tapped “YES,” and then watched Elvio quickly slide into sleep. I welcomed the silence as his moans subsided. But the silence dragged out, and I got worried.

  Then I was more than worried. Over the comm, the captain whispered a single curse in Portuguese: “Porra.”

  If Nick Aames was shaken, I was scared. “What’s the matter, Captain?”

  “That data packet was an alert from the reactor system. Cooling was offline, and temperature was already in the red. Indicators of a critical failure in progress.”

  “Critical? That fast?”

  “Or not. With the collision, there could be a subcritical failure, explosion, decompression, maybe other failures as well. We can’t know, but we can hear the result. The Bradbury is offline.”

  “But our food . . . our tools . . .”

  “No need to do an inventory, Smith. The bulk of our consumables were up there.”

  I swallowed, my dry throat painful. “Then we’re dead.”

  “You’re mighty talkative for a corpse,” Nick replied.

  I couldn’t believe his scorn in this situation. “It’s only a matter of time.” I couldn’t keep a half sob from creeping into my voice.

  “You don’t know that, Ensign!” Then Nick’s tone changed. “I’ve seen you in bad times, Smitty: bar fights, rescues, battles with incompetent officers. I have seldom seen you lose, and I have never seen you give up without a fight. Am I wrong?” I had only heard that tone a handful of times in all the years I had known him: he was trying to be comforting, in his awkward way.

  I tried to steady my voice. “No, sir.”

  “Of course not. I count on you for that. Yes, this situation is bad, but we’re still alive. Our best chance to stay that way is to keep our heads together. We need all of us, every single one, with our heads in the game. Panic now will kill us.”

  A little stronger, I answered: “Yes, sir.”

  “This isn’t a hopeless situation, Ensign. That new Holmes prototype, the Collins, is due to orbit Mars in eight months. If we can hold out, we can catch a ride home.”

  “Sir, at their approach speed? They’ll be almost impossible to catch.”

  Nick sounded indignant. “Are you questioning my piloting skills?”

  “No, sir.” But I had doubts, whether I said them out loud or not. Like the Aldrin today, the Collins was on a cycler orbit, with a high-speed pass before the trip back to Earth. When the Aldrin passes a planet, she rendezvouses with special high-speed t
ransfer shuttles, orbits perfectly timed to intersect her course. But the Collins was a prototype. Mars had no transfer shuttles back then.

  “Good. Trust me, we’ll make the rendezvous, but only if we last that long.”

  “But eight months, captain? Without the Bradbury?”

  “We don’t know that. Plus we have survival resources in this shelter pit, and some should be salvageable in yours. We need to know what we have to work with if we’re going to make a plan. I need you to do a complete inventory. Check it against the computer’s manifest, and don’t overlook anything. I’m going to send you an annotated manifest with the items we must have. I don’t care how much sand you have to dig through, but find those items! Then find anything else you can. We’re going to have to stretch our resources further than they were ever intended, so we don’t know what could prove useful. When you have that inventory done, report back to me.”

  “To you, sir? Not Lieutenant Gale?”

  “Oh, inform Gale, of course. But inform me first.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again Nick’s tone turned confidential. “I’m going to need you to keep an eye on things, Smith. Van der Ven’s out, and Pagnotto’s concussed. I can’t tell what’s up with Carver, but he’s awfully quiet. And Horace . . .”

  “I know, sir.” Gale had always had trouble with Captain Aames. He was always looking for the easy answer, the fast answer. Gale had powerful friends in the Initiative, so the captain was stuck with him for political reasons, but we all knew there was friction there.

  “I’m not sure you do, Smith. This is more than just his usual lazy attitude. Gale’s a nervous wreck from the surgery. It’s one thing to do virtual medical training, it’s another to saw off your friend’s leg without even a doctor to supervise, so I’m going to cut Gale a little slack this time. But that means you’re the only one I can count on to hold it together there. If trouble comes down—”

  “More trouble, you mean.”

  “If trouble comes down, I trust you to handle it. Don’t let rank slow you down.”

  I tried to smile. “Have I ever, Captain?”

  “That’s the spirit, Smith. I knew I could count on you. Now get to work. For the next eight months, there’s no such thing as spare time. We’ll have to use every second to stay alive.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  The comm went silent, and I had a brief shudder of panic, of aloneness. Elvio was with me, Gale and Carver and Van der Ven were just beyond the pressure door, and Captain Aames was only a comm call away; but there in the flickering light, buried beneath the surface of Mars, and doubting any of us would live through this, I felt alone, cut off from humanity. I’m not proud to say it, but right there, I collapsed to the floor and just sobbed in my helmet.

  After a while, I found myself staring at the shifting shadows from the swinging light panel, and I realized I had no idea how long I had been staring. Damn. “We’ll have to use every second to stay alive,” the captain had said, and here I was wasting who knows how many minutes wallowing in self-pity. If Nick Aames had been there, he would’ve kicked my ass for sure.

  Well, the captain wasn’t there, so I would have to kick my own ass. “Take an inventory?” I said to the silent comm. “Yes, sir.” I pushed myself up from the floor—wincing a little at the pain in my left ribs—and began searching the shelter pit. This wouldn’t be easy with all the devastation in the pit, but I appreciated a challenge to keep me busy.

  I started by stacking the tiles and fragments into neat piles, clearing the floor and making it easier to work. I used my suit comp to keep a verbal inventory, counting off each tile or partial tile and describing its condition. I also kept an eye open for falling tiles: even in the low gravity, a tile that fell from the ceiling could damage my environment system. Further damage it, I should say. I had confirmed that my water bag had burst. Most of my drinking water was now soaked into my skivvies, mixing with the sweat I was working up. Eventually I could reclaim it if there was a working cycler in the shelter; but until then, the work was making me mighty thirsty.

  With the floors cleared up, I started my search in earnest. Looking around, I could see that most of the wall cabinets were sealed, so I could assume their contents were intact. I had a manifest somewhere in my comp. “Suit, show me the manifest for this pit.” My heads-up lit up with a display of the pit’s contents as of the last computer inventory, as well as a map that overlay the scene in front of me, highlighting where to find stuff. There was a lot we could use in there: spare lander parts that might be adapted to other uses, food concentrates, electronics, almost everything from the captain’s notes. There were even spare air bottles, filled by a little catalytic compressor that extracted oxides from the soil. I checked my own O2 levels and Elvio’s: both were low, so I swapped in bottles from the compressor.

  Then I checked the manifest for—Yes!—water bags, also from the catalytic compressor. I found one, swapped it into my environment pack, and sucked on my straw. I tasted water at last! It had a high mineral content and a definite tang of iron. “Martian Springs,” the first expedition had dubbed it, but I didn’t care: at that moment it was the sweetest thing I had ever tasted. I bit the valve harder and sucked as fast as I could. Even as I did so, I felt dampness spreading through my skivvies. There was definitely a leak in my environment system, but hydration was doing wonders for my spirits.

  Captain Aames was right: we were a bunch of smart engineers and survivors, and we could do wonders with all these resources if we didn’t panic.

  The cabinets that had sprung open in the shaking had spilled their contents into the sand. I would’ve killed for a vacuum to scoop up the sand, or maybe a good old pitchfork to sift through it. I already knew there was debris under there, and you could hide a lot more under that artificial beach.

  Then I remembered something from the manifest: a tool cabinet in the east wall contained “excavating tools.” I opened that entry to look at the details, and it included a hand vac. Unfortunately, the tool cabinet was behind the collapsed lift, so it took some digging and scraping to get to it. I almost got stuck between the lift and the wall, and I gasped in pain at one point when my ribs got pinched again; but eventually, I emerged with the vacuum and a big grin on my face. It felt good to have a triumph, no matter how small.

  Now what to do with all this dust? There was no way to get rid of it all, and no place to put it. Even trying would exhaust my air faster than the compressors could replace it. But I really didn’t need to move all of it. What was most important were the areas near the spilled cabinets. After those, we could work on the other areas in our spare time. I just needed to sift the cabinet areas for valuable supplies.

  I ran the hand vac over the pile. It left large items behind, but it picked up small items along with the dust. I had to check the interior filter frequently, pulling out small treasures and setting them aside as I dictated: “Suit, inventory: one box bolts, five millimeters, count twenty.” It might not seem like much, but that box of bolts was on the captain’s special list. Victory!

  Another box, another item from the list. “Suit: one box washers, five millimeters, count twenty.” I added two coils of wire and another box of washers; then I pulled parts from the filter, shook the dust from them, and set them on a shelf so I wouldn’t lose them. I was like an old forty-niner panning for gems more precious than gold, only without water.

  Damn. Why did I have to think about water? The air from the compressor was drier than what we had brought with us, and I really wanted a drink; but I knew I should control my water usage, especially given my leak.

  So I put water out of my mind, and I concentrated on my vacuuming and sifting. It felt good to have something to do, something that occupied my mind and gave me tiny reasons to hope. Every small discovery made me think: How can this help us survive? Could those nuts and bolts help us to seal the shelter pit and build a better shelter? Could those wires help us build a radio that could reach the Collins? Every discov
ery was ripe with possibilities, and those possibilities kept me working. Well, those, plus my determination not to disappoint Captain Aames.

  Soon I had enough salvage to fill a shelf, so I started another shelf and kept working. After about an hour, I saw the pressure door to the shelter open, and Carver and Gale came out in their suits. They helped Pagnotto through the pressure door, and Gale went in with him. Then Carver looked at what I was doing; and without saying a word, he found another hand vac and started searching the dust along the far wall.

  We worked for two hours that way, in silence other than our inventory counts. I tried making small talk, but Carver was having none of it. A few times I caught his face through his visor, and his eyes looked hollow. The captain was right: this situation was dragging Carver down to a very dark place. That wasn’t good for him, and it wasn’t good for the rest of us either. We needed every hand; but worse, despair could turn contagious. I tried to get him to open up, but I had no luck.

  Slowly our eyeball inventory lined up with the computer manifest. A few small parts might remain lost in the dust; but if there was anything critical buried there, we would find it when we needed it. So as Carver was sifting by the last spilled cabinet, I turned my attention to the access turret. Carver and Gale had cleaned out enough debris to recover Shannon’s body, but the shaft was still mostly filled with collapsed tiles and the wreckage of stairs. Fragments of the turret roof lay beside the shaft, including one large chunk that was stained with blood. I also found shards of Shannon’s helmet. Our helmets were light but incredibly strong. A normal impact couldn’t shatter them, but they were never designed to survive a falling roof.

  I started stacking and inventorying the stairs and tiles, and immediately saw the source of the wind and all the sand. The ceiling shaft was jammed with wall panels and roof fragments; but there were still large gaps, and my suit lights showed constant swirls of red Martian dust. The surface turret was just gone, completely swept away by the explosion of the propellant factory. Nearly three hours later, the sandstorm was still blowing strong. The pit was a sealed area, so the storm was mostly held at bay, but some wind and dust still found their way down the shaft. I knew that if I could clear the shaft, there was a secondary hatch I could seal against the storm. I stopped wasting time on inventory and stacking, and just started pitching debris out into the pit. I kept a watchful eye, as several times I dislodged pieces that then caused others to fall from above; but in the low gravity, I had plenty of time to dodge them.