Aliyaah looked at Silver for a couple of seconds, then said slowly, "We have the organism isolated now, right? From the samples you took from Dom."
Silver hesitated, then answered, "Well, I don't know if it's the organism itself or simply what it leaves behind after… after it's done feeding."
"Can you analyse it further using the M-Lab?"
"I'll try, of course, but we'd be better off if we had an actual biochemist working on this. Rovers, rockets, and SEVs are more in my wheelhouse, not microscopic flesh-eating organisms."
Silver laughed as Aliyaah said, "Well I don't think anyone wants to be in that wheelhouse."
"I will check with Hadley to see if there's a specialist who can work with Schiff," Aliyaah said, and moved away to contact Commander Hadley.
When Aliyaah returned, Silver saw that her expression had changed. There was a deep crease in her brow and her shoulders were tight.
"What's going on, Chief?" Silver asked, seeing how the Chief's general exhaustion had been overcome by something acutely worrisome.
"It's Octavia. Hadley wants her up and running right away, but the crew are having some issues."
Aliyaah looked directly at Silver, who nodded and said, "You have to go over there, don't you? So, Hadley's asking you to break protocol? He'll know where you are."
Aliyaah smiled thinly, and Silver nodded, understanding that Aliyaah was their best option for getting Octavia prepared for launch.
"I won't reveal your location, though," Aliyaah said.
Silver pursed her lips, then said, "You'll need the SEV. And take these." Silver grabbed a handful of anti-rads and passed them to the Chief.
Their hands touched for a moment, and Aliyaah said quietly, "I'm sorry, Sil."
"I know. It's OK," Silver said, and smiled.
"I'll come back, Sil. Once Octavia is up and running. I'll come back for you."
Silver laughed. "I'll be waiting," she said, and watched the Chief walk away as she added quietly, "It's not like I'm going anywhere." As Aliyaah entered the airlock, Silver couldn't help but wonder if it was the last time they'd see each other alive.
TWENTY-FIVE
Alone in the biodome, Silver's attention started to wane and she felt herself drift in and out of sleep. She hadn't slept properly in several sols and the hum of the spinning centrifuge was dangerously soporific. Her eyelids grew heavier and her soldreams mingled with snatches of memory from biology classes at school.
As a child, Silver had spent hours in the school library. She had been obsessed with books about stars and space travel, and would hide in the library at recess and lunch, dreaming about rocket ships. While the other kids played outside, Silver had clung to the idea of becoming an astronaut, desperate to feel connected to something greater than herself and to envision a life that didn't resemble that of her parents.
One day, Silver turned the pages of a book on astrophysics and discovered why it was that the barns she saw littering the landscape of America on her travels with her father were painted such a specific colour. As a star shrinks and starts to run out of fuel, the temperature and pressure increase and heavier and heavier elements begin to fuse. Eventually, all that is left is iron, an element so tightly bound that it absorbs energy during fusion, cooling the star until its death. Eons ago, when dying stars finally exploded, the iron in their cores was scattered across the universe, and the resulting abundance of iron oxide in the earth led to its use as a pigment for cheap paint.
To Silver, learning about nuclear fusion in dying stars was as good as reading any book about wizards and magic. Red barns may well be commonplace, but for Silver every barn she saw suddenly felt special, as if the barns had been painted with the stars themselves. After reading the book, whenever they drove by another barn on their way to another town where her father would try to sell farm equipment, Silver felt like she had a window into the past and, perhaps, to her future too.
Despite her father's insistence that she attend Sunday School, Silver's formal education had left her with the feeling that the universe was understandable only as the random activity of atoms and particles careening around space, forming objects, beings, consciousness, and resources for human exploitation. She, like everyone else, would live a linear life, slave to an internal chronology based on her physical form, and her expectations. Without such form, she would no longer be herself, and yet the tissues, cells, molecules, and atoms of her body were almost continually in flux. How she started out life would not be how it would end. Her body would destroy and recreate itself countless times, until no part of her original form remained. Even her memory would be made up of different cells and pathways, recreating itself each time she unfolded a memory.
This rationalisation of life simultaneously comforted and terrified Silver. She wanted to have an intellectual appreciation for the complexity and connectedness of the universe, but to also feel that connection. The closest she had come to really feeling this was when she was pregnant, when her baby was simultaneously part of her and yet growing into an entirely different being. The sudden separation when Cosima was born had been more of a shock than she had anticipated. It hadn't taken long for Silver to accept the severing of this connection, but after the initial shock subsided, Silver sensed that the love she felt for Cosima had changed; it was no less true, but the quality of it had been somehow altered. She wondered if it was the same for her own mother, or for her friends, but she had never felt like it was something she could say out loud.
As a child, Silver had crossed through reserve land on those road trips with her father, and had taken great care not to draw his attention to her origins. She would hunker down in the truck, hiding herself from sight whenever they stopped for gas or food. Her father seemed happiest when she stayed in the vehicle, and the few times when someone did see Silver, she quickly looked away from their curious stares. As an adult, Silver sometimes wondered how her view of the world might be radically different had she grown up immersed in Navajo culture, with people who saw her and accepted her as she truly was.
Day after day, while her father drove in silence down the seemingly endless desert roads, Silver had thought about the barns and felt an unnameable sadness. The farmers had painted these inelegant structures with something as magical as stardust, not knowing what she knew. Such nonchalance, such a lack of curiosity, seemed utterly bizarre, almost blasphemous, to Silver.
Over time, that simple discovery in her school library led her on a path that took her all the way to this biodome on Mars. She dreamed that she was walking from barn to barn, the contrast of the red with the yellow fields, stretching out her future and that of all humanity across California, Arizona, and into the unknown. She sang as she walked, and all space and time became part of her and was created by her. She could always see just a little farther ahead, but beyond that, at the limits of her imagination, she felt the slow slide into darkness, into nothing.
A voice in Silver's mind told her that to keep the dream intact, she had to keep walking, keep singing, but her throat felt dry, her eyelids gritty. When she woke, Silver was confused to find that she wasn't in the school library or laboratory, nor was she in the biodome. Instead, she was standing on the surface of the red planet, the dust storms whispering all around her, singing their own song. Silver took a deep breath and, for just a second, her eyes were open wide to a new world. Then she heard the centrifuge beeping, and she blinked. She was sitting at the workbench, and could see the samples, shimmering with the same white crystals as before.
Realising that she had finally succumbed to sleep after what seemed like sols of wakefulness, and recognising the dangers inherent in being unconscious in the centre of the biodome, Silver decided to move to a safer location to rest. If there was another crisis, the lack of proper sleep would dull her reactions.
Silver spent a few minutes setting up samples for analysis, and entered her clearance codes to bypass the communications blackout and automate the data transmission to Mission Support. She tidied the w
orkbench and looked at the schematic for the biodome, berating herself silently for not remembering the location of the storm bunker. This kind of information should be lodged in her memory, and while she could rationalize the memory lapse as a result of exhaustion, she couldn't help but think that it was a sign of something more sinister.
The storm bunker was the safest place to get some sleep. It was secure and would offer protection if a solar storm occurred. The schematic showed her that the bunker was beneath the inner dome, with the easiest access through a hatch from the outer dome. She picked up the Medical Kit and her scanner, then made her way to the airlock.
The stillness of the empty biodome was unnerving. She had grown used to the sounds of the station, with its busy corridors and the frenetic activity in the hangar. She had always loved the silence in the SEV, but where that solitude had felt like a reprieve, this felt dangerously close to permanent isolation.
It had only been an hour since Aliyaah had left in the SEV. She would have arrived at Octavia by now. Silver had an urge to contact the Chief, but she had nothing new to report and felt foolish for simply wanting to hear Aliyaah's voice. She fought the urge to check-in without reason, knowing that the Chief would be busy. She briefly thought about contacting Hadley, just to hear a voice other than her own, but he had enough to deal with and an unnecessary call from her would only make him suspicious as to her state of mind.
It was imperative that they get Octavia operational, and coordinate with NASA to ensure a safe exit from the planet. The launch window was shrinking fast, and if they couldn't get the ship launched in time they would be unable to complete the journey with the supplies they had left.
As Silver calculated how much time they had to flee the planet, a voice in her head pointed out that she had failed to factor in recent events: with significantly fewer passengers and crew on the return flight, the remaining supplies would stretch further. While this thought provided brief comfort, Silver couldn't help but think that recent events might simply mean that they wouldn't make it off the planet at all. Knowing she needed to maintain her composure, she told herself to take a breath and work the problem.
Silver entered the bunker, secured the door behind her, and sat down on one of the beds. With her head in her hands, she tried to quiet the tangle of voices in her mind. She was having difficulty unscrambling the threads of thought, as if she was overhearing a confusion of voices, rather than her own consciousness.
At least now that she was in the bunker she was protected from the worst of the GCRs and from any solar flares. If the unidentified organism did feed on radiation, this bunker could be the best place to lay low while they figured out a plan. Silver thought back to what Aliyaah had said about the Commander and how the death of the organism might result in the host's death if the two were already inextricably connected. As Silver closed her eyes, she thought of the nanobots running around in her blood. Did the biomarkers mean that she was already infected? Was the organism now so closely entwined with her own body that its death would mean her own?
Despite that sombre thought, Silver felt the weight of oncoming sleep. Her breathing slowed and the multitude of voices in her mind dropped away, leaving her with a thread of thought resting in a soft silence: when she woke, would she still know who and where she was? Would she even wake up at all?
TWENTY-SIX
The solar storm struck at midnight, lighting up the night sky over the planet's northern hemisphere. Swirling red and purple clouds danced at the horizon, over the lip of the crater, the quarry, the station, the empty biodomes, Octavia.
A rapid influx of charged particles crashed into atoms and molecules in the ever-present Martian dust clouds, releasing massive amounts of energy as clouds of hot gas, and knots of magnetism wrenched themselves free from the sun's surface.
All communications were disrupted between Mars and Earth and on the red planet itself. As was protocol when a solar storm hit, inessential technology was powered down and personnel took cover wherever they could. The minutes ticked by, then the hours, and still the sky glowed a fiery red and bruised purple.
Mars SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory that predicted space weather on the planet, sounded the alert an hour before the first effects of the storm reached the planet. The coronal mass ejection bombarded Mars with charged particles. The exploding sunspot swept aside huge amounts of GCRs, and deflected the charged particles to significantly lower atmospheric radiation. As expected, the number and intensity of solar storms had decreased since Octavia's launch. They were moving away from the solar maximum of 2036, when the sun's activity was at its peak.
Space agencies almost always scheduled interplanetary travel during the solar maximum because this reduced exposure to cosmic rays. The downside was that they had to be on constant alert for solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
This latest storm was an anomaly, lasting for half a sol instead of just a few minutes or an hour. A large coronal mass ejection like this could suppress cosmic rays for several sevensols, but it also disrupted navigational equipment, communications, and power.
Anyone who was outside in a storm like this would be bombarded with high-energy solar protons. To survive a Mars solar storm required getting to a shelter before the storm hit, or having immediate treatment for exposure. Otherwise, the best-case scenario was a quick death as damage to DNA prevented mitochondria from producing the energy the body needed to survive. At worst, an astronaut would die slowly as DNA damage stopped their body from producing functional cells.
The anti-rads helped stave off the worst of the damage, and the colony was protected by shields at the station, domes, and other major structures, but the system wasn't foolproof. Like all astronauts, Aliyaah and Silver had signed up knowing that their time in space was limited and would likely shorten their lifespans. Longer missions like Octavia would have an even greater impact. After her husband's death, Aliyaah had felt few qualms about signing on for such a lengthy stay in space. And for Silver, the risk was worth taking, even if Cooper saw things differently.
More insidious than the sun, cosmic rays could penetrate the hull of their ships, the station, biodomes, and even, to some degree, the shelters. These supercharged subatomic particles shot out across the universe, from black holes and stars exploding outside the solar system, and no one had yet discovered how to block them from passing through the human body.
As Hadley organised the crew working on the walkway, Aliyaah hunkered down in the ship itself. The storm meant that they were relegated to working inside the ship instead of on the launch pad. In the bunker beneath the biodome, Silver remained unaware of the storm, sleeping fitfully, waking from one dream and sliding unaware into another.
In Silver's dream, she was standing on the exterior walkway, her head protected only by a simple oxygen mask that covered enough of her face to prevent the moisture from her eyes, mouth, and nose from rapidly and painfully evaporating, effectively boiling away in the dry Martian atmosphere.
An extremophilic fungus spread slowly across the surface of Mars, making its way out of the quarry and towards the station. As the fungus drew closer, Silver felt her tongue grow thick in her mouth, and her eyes become sticky. Her vision clouded over. The air was too thin. The mask was failing. Silver clutched at the mask, but it was no longer there. She clawed at her face and neck, holding her breath against the freezing Martian atmosphere. If she opened her mouth, the moisture in her lungs would evaporate and her body would go into shock. She would decompress and die in excruciating pain.
But Silver didn't die. Her eyes weren't desiccated. In fact, her vision had cleared. Still, she tried to find the mask and glanced up at the station, knowing that she wouldn't have enough time to get back inside before her body gave out. The station had vanished, and Silver looked down to see that the walkway had vanished too. She was alone and naked on the dusty surface of the red planet, and Silver watched as the Martian landscape morphed into limestone cliffs littered with nuclear
hazard signs. The fungus drew closer by the second. Its fruiting bodies had a crystalline structure, unlike any fungi she had seen before. The organism seemed to rise and fall, a morass of arms and torsos, heads and faces she couldn't quite place, growing in and out of the earth. This miasmic sea of semi-human forms grew ever nearer.
Paralysed by terror, Silver watched as the figures shrank back into a carpet of spores, then coated her feet and legs, rising up her body and snaking their way into her nostrils, her ears, her mouth. In her dream, Silver gasped, and when she woke, she was standing at the control panel in the bunker. The automatic climate controls had been disabled, and Silver was surprised she could still breathe. She was surprised to still be alive at all.
The weight of her dream pressed down on her, but as she took breath after breath the air in the shelter cleared her mind and the thin sheen of sweat coating her skin started to dissipate.
Silver tried to hold onto her dream, and wondered what, if anything, her mind was trying to tell her. She thought about how the landscape had changed to something reminiscent of England's Peak District. What was the connection between that and radiation? Why the nuclear hazard signs?
Suddenly, Silver remembered back to a biology class she had taken early in college, and how British researchers working near a dumping ground for nuclear waste had found extremophilic organisms. The scientific community had been abuzz with speculation that the organisms had evolved to quench radiation before it could damage their cells. There had been so much excitement about the possibility of creating an internal barrier through symbiosis, but laboratory tests in a simulated human system failed, and some researchers began to reconsider the complete ban on animal testing. Hearing of mutterings in the research community, lawyers representing the personhood of non-human animals moved quickly, reminding the scientists of the law, the lives lost, and the horrors associated with drugs that had been approved for human use based on misleading evidence from animal research. Silver, hadn't paid much attention at the time, and was surprised at how the memory had suddenly resurfaced.
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