"That's not what I mean. You're being...." Silver stopped herself and took a breath. She stuffed the pillow into the case and then held it to her chest and said, "I get that it's a whole load of unknowns. And, yeah, there are risks, but if you just saw Octavia, you'd see she's totally different to the shuttles you've flown. Cosima would love it. You'd love it! And you'd get to be in space without even having to push a button or write a status report."
Cooper sat down heavily on the bed and twisted the duvet cover in her hands. "I'm not being unreasonable. I'm not."
Silver sat down beside Cooper, just close enough that their thighs touched. She looked over at Cooper, but Cooper kept her gaze fixed on the floor.
"You're excited. You always are when you're about to leave. But I just can't get fired up at the prospect of you being away for two years."
"So come with me," Silver said, reaching across to put her hand on Cooper's leg.
Cooper looked up at Silver and shook her head slowly. She let the bedding slide off her lap and shuffled back on the bed. "No, Sil. My life is here. Cosima's life is here."
"But, you're my life, you and Cosima," Silver said, feeling the thickness of tears behind her eyes.
"We're not though, are we?" Cooper lay back on the bed, letting her tears fall onto the fresh sheets.
"That's not fair, Cooper. We knew going into this that one or the other of us would be away for long stretches. We both signed up for this life." Silver lay down beside Cooper and gently turned her face so she could kiss her. Then she rested her head against Cooper's shoulder and said, "This is the life we wanted, right? We're so lucky. I just don't understand why you've changed your mind about this."
Cooper swallowed hard and pulled away from Silver. "Things are different now. Since Cosima was born, this is it for me. I don't want to leave. And I don't want you to leave, - "
"But - "
"Please, let me finish," Cooper said. She sat up on her elbows and looked down at Silver, holding her gaze. "I don't want you to leave, but I know you will. I know you have to, and that's OK. But I'm not coming with you, and neither is Cosima."
"What are you saying?" Silver asked, sitting up and placing her hands gently on Coopers face. "Is this, are you...."
"We want different things now. I've changed." Cooper shook her head, and Silver let her hands fall into her lap.
"But it's just one mission. It's just two years," Silver said, looking down at her hands and resisted the urge to pick at the glittery mess of pink polish Cosima had painted her nails with the day before.
"Don't lie to yourself, Sil. Don't lie to me, or to Cosima. We both know it's not just this mission. Even when you get back, you'll be preparing for the next one, and the next. Or maybe you'll end up staying on Mars. Your life is up there, not here with us. That’s just how it is."
"That's not true," Silver said quietly. "I can still call it off. I can let the Director know first thing in the morning that he needs to find a replacement."
"But that won't change anything. Not really. You'll just be here wishing you were there. You'll resent me. You'll resent our daughter. I can't live like that, and I can't live every day while you're gone waiting to hear if you're even coming home."
"So, you're leaving me?" Silver said quietly, trying to clasp Cooper's hands to pull her closer.
Cooper resisted, and took a step backwards. "You already left, Sil. You left when you said yes to Mars."
Three
"Flight Engineer Antara to Hangar Five. FE Antara, Hangar Five."
The announcement blared out of the computer near Silver's bed and jolted her from a dream. Within seconds she was on her feet and pulling on her overalls. She rubbed her eyes and looked over at the clock on the computer, where the emergency signal was still flashing.
4.37 am.
She wasn't due to start her shift until noon. Something must have gone wrong with Rover Four again, she thought, letting out an exasperated sigh. Her EV suit hung by the door and she thought about taking it with her, but surely the alert would have told her to bring it if it was necessary. She left it and slid open the door to her cabin.
She could hear footsteps approaching quickly, so she carefully stepped outside and stuck close to the wall as she closed the door behind her.
Aliyaah appeared around the corner and Silver was relieved to see she was just wearing her overalls.
"What's going on?" Silver asked as she hurried to keep up with the much taller Chief, who had begun sprinting to the hangar.
"An accident at the quarry," the Chief said.
"Why do they need us?" Silver asked, trying to catch a breath and wishing there had been enough time for her to stretch out her sleepy limbs before this early morning sprint down the narrow hallways of the station.
"There's an issue with a refiner," Aliyaah said. "There were injuries. A miner's trapped in the machine."
"Jesus," Silver said as they reached the airlock leading to the hangar.
"Yeah." Aliyaah drummed her fingers against the airlock door and looked sideways at Silver. Someone was already in the airlock, going through decontamination, which would take another thirty seconds or so. Silver was glad of the excuse to catch her breath, and made a mental note to start using the station's gym more frequently.
Aliyaah, who had barely broken a sweat, gave Silver a concerned look, but it didn't seem to be a commentary on her fitness. "I don't know what we're about to walk into," Aliyaah said. "But I'm guessing it's not pretty."
The airlock opened and they ran through decontamination as quickly as they could. When they walked out into the hangar, they were confronted with a chaotic scene. The great hulk of the refiner crowded the centre of the hangar, surrounded by miners and engineers, some of whom Silver suspected had hitched a ride on the machine. A couple of the miners were still hanging onto the side of the refiner, and everyone seemed to be yelling at once.
The refiner, which only just fit in the hangar at some twenty feet tall, was coated in red dust. The air was thick with the smell of it. One engineer was trying to make space in the crowd so that he could get an aerial work platform up next to the refiner.
Aliyaah ran over and took charge, helping to clear a path. Silver followed her and repeated Aliyaah's call for the hangar to be cleared of everyone aside from essential personnel. If this turned out to be a grisly retrieval, rather than a rescue, it was best to limit the number of witnesses.
When she reached the platform, Silver saw that another engineer had already climbed up.
"Yo, Sil," Jaz held out her hand to haul Silver up beside her and Silver reluctantly took it. Jaz grinned at her and said, "Crazy shit, right?"
Silver gave a small nod as her only reply. She had done her best to avoid sharing shifts with Jaz, who she found to be mouthy and arrogant. She suspected that Jaz was tampering with her implants to boost her levels of growth hormone and testosterone, but Silver wouldn't fink on her, not unless she had hard evidence and thought it was affecting Jaz's ability to carry out her duties. There had been an incident a couple of years earlier, where some younger astronaut candidates had been reported for tweaking. They were thrown out of the programme, but were snapped up by private enterprises like SolarEx. The academy had a zero-tolerance policy on tweaking, but that just made folks more adept at hiding what they were doing.
Right now, Jaz seemed amped up and smelled to Silver like a mix of stale sweat, the inside of an old flight suit, and some cloying body spray. The floral scent didn't seem to fit, and Silver wondered if Jaz was trying to mask a T-induced change in body odour. If she was tampering with her med pump to help her bulk up, it was working. Jaz was ripped. Silver tried not to stare, but Jaz had her orange overalls tied at her waist and was wearing just a white vest that showed off some serious muscles. Jaz caught Silver looking and smirked at her. Maybe there was something else driving Jaz to tweak. Maybe she was already working with Doctor Schiff. Who was Silver to judge?
The space programme had been officially opened to trans and non-bin
ary people a few years earlier, but the barriers to education and opportunity for anyone not cisgender had left a legacy that would take decades to overcome. Silver didn't know of any astronauts or even astronaut candidates who were trans or genderqueer. Space remained one of the last few places where the gender binary was painfully persistent, despite the increased access to drugs that were previously hard to come by. Everyone in the space program had been fitted with a hormone implant, but these were closely monitored, so there was little freedom for anyone to figure things out on their own terms.
Silver had no interest in tweaking her own implant, and was well aware that a double standard would apply if she was even suspected of doing so. She didn't like to dwell on it, but Silver knew that her position on the team, as a woman married to another woman, was still an issue for some of her colleagues. No one could question her commitment, expertise, or her physical readiness, even after having had a child, but that didn't always matter, especially for a woman of colour. Still, while she sympathised with those taking advantage of improved access to hormones to help them transition, she was uncomfortable with the potential safety issues for anyone tweaking without proper supervision.
Silver glanced sideways again at Jaz, and worried about her colleague. Jaz looked far from healthy. Her pale, clammy skin seemed almost to glow under the bright hangar lights. Jaz moved closer to Silver and angled a screen her way. She'd located the video footage from the accident at the refinery.
"Looks like a real clusterfuck," Jaz said. "Some explosion, huh?"
Silver nodded and said, "Is that the radiological alarm?"
"Yeah. They'd just loaded a refiner up with rock from the north of the quarry. Guess the old girl didn't like her new diet."
"That area of the quarry hadn't been mined before?" Silver asked, and Jaz shook her head. She worked out there more often than Silver, helping the miners maintain the machines.
"One of the guys got inside to take a look."
"While the radiological alarm was sounding and the machine was still powered up?" Silver asked, appalled at the riskiness of such a move.
"Nah, they're not that stupid." Jaz shook her head at Silver. "It was a false alarm. They scanned again before he climbed down. His suit should have handled the background radiation just fine."
"So, what? The alarm was an anomaly?" Silver asked.
Jaz shrugged. "I guess. Some weird shit happens out at the quarry. Don't even get me started. This one time -"
"So, the machine was powered off?" Silver said, interrupting Jaz. She had no desire to hear about the exploits of the miners. The quarry already had a reputation at the station as the place to go for a little unsanctioned R and R.
Jaz pouted, clearly wanting a better audience than Silver. She looked back at the video footage and said, "I don't know. The guys are totally sure, one hundred percent, that they cut the juice. It just started up on its own, or some shit."
"That's impossible," Silver said, trying not to think about what she was about to see as they reached the top of the machine.
"Well, yeah, but that's what they said happened," Jaz said, eyeballing Silver as the platform juddered to a stop near the top of the refiner. Jaz released the gate at the front of the platform and was about to step out onto the side of the refiner, but Silver put out a hand to stop her.
Silver called down to Aliyaah. "This thing is definitely inactive, right?"
Aliyaah yelled up confirmation that they had cut the lines from the power cells, then tapped her ear to tell Silver to activate her intercom.
Jaz stepped forward and Silver followed her to the rail that bordered the massive hole at the centre of the machine. This was where the quarry workers dumped the extracted rock, to be processed into the elements needed to keep the station functioning; to make fuel and construction materials; and to provide the minerals for the biodomes where they would grow the food they would need for a self-sustaining colony. Now, somewhere in the depths of the machine, there was a lost miner, or what was left of him.
"If he's in there, he's fucked, right?" Jaz said, voicing Silver's own concern. "There's no way this guy's not mincemeat," Jaz looked over at Silver and raised an eyebrow.
Silver shared Jaz's doubts, but said, "We have to operate on the assumption that he could still be trapped. There's a chance he avoided getting, er, processed."
"Ha! Processed. Yeah. But if he fell through those first large blades into the real belly of this bitch, he's just pulp now. And that's if he didn't get crushed by any boulders."
Silver swallowed, not wanting to entertain the images that kept crowding her mind. She stepped up beside Jaz and began a sweep of the interior with the flashlight on her utility belt.
"Nada," Jaz said. "Can't see a goddamn thing."
"Do you have your cats-eyes in, Specialist?" Silver asked.
"Yeah, I'll switch to infrared."
Jaz leaned farther over the railing as Silver held the back of her suit.
"See anything?"
"Nope. I can't even make out the blades. It's weird."
Silver frowned. "They're probably just halfway through a rotation, right?"
"I don't think so. It's like there's nothing in there at all."
Silver pulled Jaz back upright and Jaz blinked several times.
"Perhaps you should reset the cats-eyes?" Silver said, and as Jaz began a manual reset, Silver hooked her suit to the back of the platform and then turned her back to the dark void of the refiner. The cacophony of voices from the hangar below grew muffled, as Silver leaned back and took a step to lower herself into the refiner, holding her weight against the tether and the steep side of the machine's innards. Silver held the flashlight in one hand and angled it downward, illuminating the darkness. She could see the large blades below her, but no sign of the miner or even any rock residue.
There was a sudden screech of metal and the tether holding Silver went suddenly slack, causing her to drop her flashlight and tip backward until she was almost horizontal across the top of the refiner. The flashlight danced around on its lanyard, scattering light haphazardly until it stilled, shining its light uselessly against the wall of the machine.
"Sorry, boss!" Jaz yelled from above. "Tether's jammed. You gotta come back up."
As Jaz began to slowly haul her back in, Silver gripped the tether with both hands. The flashlight jiggled on the lanyard, bumped against the metal wall, and clicked off. Silver looked down into the darkness. The emptiness was thick, swallowing light and sound, drawing Silver in deeper. There was something in the dark, though. Silver could feel it. The absence of light wasn't absolute, and Silver saw pinpricks of colour dancing briefly across her vision, almost like spores or dust motes catching the tiniest fleck of light.
Once she was upright again, Silver walked herself back up the inside of the refiner and, realising she had been holding her breath, exhaled. As she breathed in again, Silver noticed that the air inside the machine had a dank odour. The dust on the refiner had begun to lift in slow, soft clouds as it warmed in the hangar air, and Silver's eyes grew itchy. She blinked and turned her head once more to face the dark abyss of the refiner.
After a second or two, Silver noticed a sound, quiet at first, like the tick of a car engine just after it stops running. Then the sound began to change, speeding up until the clicks began to resemble a voice. Silver recoiled, not sure if she could trust what she was hearing.
"What is it?" Jaz said, as she held out her hand to help Silver back onto the platform.
"I think I heard something."
Jaz's eyes widened, the cats-eyes flickering from yellow to red. "Holy crap! You think he's in there? Alive?"
Silver hesitated. That had to be what she'd heard. The muffled sound of the missing miner calling out for help from deep in the belly of the machine. She thought about the light flickering on the control panel for the rover, the brief radiologic flare, and the strange voice she had heard echoing back at her from outside the colony. Silver still wasn't sure th
at the voice she had just heard wasn't simply inside her head. It hadn't sounded like a man's voice, nor a real cry for help. Had it just been her inner voice, an audio memory?
No, whatever she had heard must have come from the darkness of the refiner. To admit her doubt would be to get a one-way ticket to the medical bay.
Before Silver could say anything, Jaz yelled down to the crowd below. "We hear him! He's gotta be alive!" Jaz grinned at Silver, and slapped her on the back. There were cheers from the few personnel remaining on the hangar deck, and Silver looked down to see Aliyaah smiling up at her, her face questioning but excited.
Jaz had hooked up a new tether, and was already in a harness. "Clip me in, boss. I got this." Silver was about to argue, but then attached the tether to Jaz's harness and watched her step down off the platform. "Let me down slow, Sil."
Silver nodded, annoyed at Jaz's presumption of intimacy. She outranked Jaz, had significantly more experience, and considered such lapses in protocol to be signs of a wider disregard for procedure that could compromise safety and mission success.
As Jaz stepped backward into the dark chasm of the machine, Silver pushed aside her annoyance, and began to feel relieved, and then a little guilty, that Jaz had jumped at the chance to be a hero and rescue the miner. It made a certain kind of sense, Silver reasoned, given that Jaz was a Lidar expert and could interpret the scope's readout faster than Silver could. Silver had fitted Lidar equipment to the rovers; it was what they used to detect organic matter in the dust of the planet. Essentially, Lidar was the tool of choice for finding any signs of life on Mars.
Jaz tugged twice at the tether, and Silver let out a little more slack.
"Do you see anything?" Silver called down. She could see Jaz's face glowing as she held the flashlight in her mouth and slowly walked her feet down the refiner wall.
"Nada."
Silver wondered if she'd sent Jaz on a fool's errand. She had definitely heard something, though, and they needed to check out the refiner to be sure. She let out a little more slack, holding the handle of the winch tightly with both hands.
Colony Page 2