In the Red

by Christopher Swiedler

  Michael nodded. It was a nice thing for Randall to say. But when Henrik Arnason became the first person to walk on Mars, he hadn’t had to worry about a condition, had he?

  Michael stared at the helmet with a sense of dread. You’ve done this before, he told himself.

  Yes, a voice in the back of his mind replied. And how did that go for you?

  He took a deep breath and pulled the collar over his head. As soon as it sealed against his suit, everything went silent, and all he could hear was the tinny echo of his own breathing. Cold sweat dripped down the back of his neck. He hated this moment most of all. He fought the urge to tear the helmet off and suck in deep lungfuls of fresh air. After what seemed like an eternity, the suit powered on and the sounds of the room came back, relayed from microphones in his collar. The air filter hummed, and fresh air flooded into his suit. He opened his eyes and saw Randall watching him.

  “Everything all right?” Randall asked.

  Michael fidgeted. He didn’t want Randall to see how nervous he was. “I’m fine,” he said, trying to sound confident. And it was the truth, wasn’t it? All he needed to do was keep his nerves under control, and everything would be okay.

  Randall tapped the collar of Michael’s helmet, where the name PRASAD had been stenciled in black letters. “You’re Manish Prasad’s kid?”

  Michael blinked in surprise. “Do you know my dad?”

  Randall chuckled. “I was surprised when he let them talk him into running that field station. He never seemed like the type for a desk job. I was even more surprised when he convinced me to come along.”

  “You work for him?”

  “I help out at the station, which mostly means making sure the scientists don’t forget to put on their helmets before they go outside. But everyone in the Rescue Service knows your dad. Has he ever told you about how he fixed that leak in the old Hesperia habitat in the middle of a dust storm?”

  Michael shook his head. His dad hardly ever talked about the things he’d done in the Service.

  “Well, ask him sometime. Though I bet he’s pretty busy these days, isn’t he? When I left the station this morning, everyone was pretty worked up over this flare.”

  The flare? Michael looked at the airlock doors uneasily. He knew it was supposed to be a big one, but his dad hadn’t mentioned anything about it the last time he’d called. Was that why he hadn’t come home on time?

  Randall double-checked everyone’s suits, pointing out any safety checks they’d missed or settings they’d gotten wrong. When they were all ready, he led them through a set of doors into the airlock itself. The hair on the back of Michael’s neck stood on end. Stop it, he told himself. You’re not even outside yet.

  When they’d all gathered inside, Randall closed the inner doors and pulled down on a large metal handle. Their suits crackled and stretched as the air pressure around them dropped to match the atmosphere outside. The gauge on the wall settled at four thousand pascals, and the status light on the wall blinked green. The outer doors rumbled open. A thin slice of sunlight cut across the floor of the airlock, shining through a swirling cloud of dust.

  Michael’s heart pounded in his chest. It was one thing to look out at the surface through the dome of the colony, but it was something else to actually be outside, surrounded by nothing but poisonous air, wearing a scratched-up helmet that seemed to be growing smaller by the second. Was the air in his suit already getting stale, or was that just his imagination? He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He didn’t care what stupid disorder his doctor said he had. He didn’t care what had happened two years ago. He wasn’t going to let himself panic.

  Slowly the dust settled, revealing a long ramp that led up to the surface. Little drifts of copper-colored sand collected against the sides of the ramp, shifting back and forth in the wind. A sign at the top read You Are Now Leaving the Heimdall Atmospheric Containment Zone.

  “Here we go,” Randall said, and stepped out onto the Martian surface.

  2

  ONE BY ONE, the students followed Randall down the ramp and out onto a small footpath that led away from the colony. Michael trailed behind, squinting in the late-afternoon sunlight. The ground around the airlock had been graded and cleared until all that was left was a fine sand that gathered in little mounds against the colony dome. An eight-passenger rover with the Rescue Service logo stenciled on its doors was parked nearby.

  Michael stomped his feet and waited for the heating elements in his suit to catch up with the intense cold of the atmosphere. He took a deep breath and looked back at the colony. Lilith was standing just inside the dome, watching him. She mouthed, “Are you okay?” and he responded with a cautious thumbs-up.

  Randall gathered all of the students in a semicircle. “When I point to you, say your name.”

  The girl with the black hair gave a quick wave. “Marika.”

  “Bee-cher,” the boy drawled.

  “Kyle.”

  “Michael.”

  “Vivien,” the broad-shouldered girl said, but her voice came out as a deep, muffled baritone. Her eyes widened and everyone laughed.

  “Anyone want to guess why her voice sounds like that?” Randall asked. “This isn’t part of the test, by the way.”

  Michael waited a moment to see if anyone else would answer. “Her comm unit isn’t adjusting for the low pressure.”

  “Right. That’s how we’d all sound if our acoustic systems didn’t compensate for the Martian atmosphere.” Randall took out a small air gun and cleaned a sensor on her suit. “Try now.”

  “Vivien,” she said, and brightened at the sound of her voice.

  “So can anyone tell me why we use these acoustic systems, even though they’re short-range and constantly get plugged up with dust?”

  “Because sometimes radios don’t work?” Kyle offered.

  “That’s true, though if your radios are busted, you’re in a crap storm of epic proportions,” Randall said. “Any other ideas?”

  “Because they give you a sense of the speaker’s distance and direction,” Michael said.

  “Exactly. It’s the same reason we wear these fishbowl helmets. When someone is shouting at you to get the hell out of the way, you don’t want to be spinning in circles trying to figure out where they’re coming from.”

  They linked up their radios to the frequency Randall specified. His voice became sharper and more direct, as if he were standing just over Michael’s shoulder. As Randall began to explain how the test would be run, everyone’s suits beeped.

  “Those alarms are courtesy of the massive solar burp that started hitting us yesterday,” Randall said. “Be thankful—ten years ago, a flare this size would have had everyone huddled under a meter or two of solid rock. Now that Mars has a magnetic field, all we get are mild radiation warnings. And as a bonus, some beautiful northern lights.”

  Randall went down the line, checking everyone’s suits one last time, and then he lined them up next to the dome. “All right. Time for some drills. Michael, you can follow along if you want. It’ll be good practice, if nothing else.”

  Randall first made them apply patches that would seal a tear in the fabric of their suits, and then they paired up and practiced applying inflatable splints for broken legs. He simulated different problems with their air units, from imbalanced gas levels to low-pressure warnings, and had them fix each problem.

  Michael was pleasantly surprised to discover that he was already familiar with most of the drills. Some of them his dad had shown him back before his panic attacks had started, and others he’d learned when he’d helped Peter prepare to take the advanced test last year. And when Randall showed him something new, it didn’t take him long to master it.

  “You’re sure you were here to take the basic test?” Randall asked after Michael had demonstrated how to reconfigure his suit radio to account for interference. “You know this stuff better than some recruits at the academy.”

  Michael blushed. “I read the fie
ld manuals, that’s all.”

  “I bet,” Randall said, chuckling.

  “So are we going to try changing out a bad air filter?” Kyle asked. He reached back and tapped the hoses on the back of his neck, as if that were something he did regularly.

  Randall shook his head. “Too dangerous. Once you take off your vest, you have less than a minute of air left in your suit, and hot-swapping in a new one is harder than it looks. As it happens, the Rescue Service would prefer that I not kill any of my students.”

  A deep rumble ran through the ground, startling them. It took Michael a moment to locate the source: a jumpship on a landing pad had just fired its main engine. Randall, Michael, and the other students shielded their eyes from the glare and watched as it lifted off.

  “Cargo hopper,” Randall said as the ship retracted its legs and climbed upward on a pillar of blue fire. “Big one.”

  “Where do you think it’s headed?” Vivien asked.

  “Port Meridian,” Michael said automatically. Randall and the other kids looked at him in surprise. “I mean, it’s heading southeast. And with that trajectory, it’s not making a short hop. So probably Port Meridian.”

  “Could be,” Randall agreed with a smile. “But we’re not here for ground control training. Everyone jump in the rover. Kyle, you’re first up.”

  They climbed into the vehicle, with Kyle in the driver’s seat and Randall next to him. Michael sat next to Marika, in the third row of seats. The rover’s big tires reached up almost to his shoulder. Marika fastened her seat belt and pulled at the roll bar that stretched over their heads, as if testing its strength.

  “If I’d known we were going to have to ride with Kyle driving, I would have stayed in bed,” she whispered, winking at Michael.

  At Randall’s direction, Kyle backed the rover out of the corral and out onto a concrete roadway. After about a kilometer, they turned off the road and onto the rough Martian terrain. Michael checked his pulse on his wrist screen. It was a little elevated, but not too bad. He flexed his fingers. So far, so good.

  “So what gives?” Marika asked. “First you say you’re here for the basic test, and then it turns out you know all this stuff better than any of us.”

  Michael felt the blood rushing to his face. “I didn’t mean to—I mean, I just—”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Marika said, waving her hand. “I’m just curious. You’re Peter’s brother, right? I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  “You’re friends with him?” Michael asked, making a face.

  Marika laughed. “Kind of. So why haven’t you gotten your basic certification yet?”

  “I tried when I was ten.” He looked back at the colony dome, which was quickly receding behind them. Why was he telling her this? “I made it about fifty meters from the airlock before I puked and passed out.”

  “Oh,” she said. “My aunt is like that. She can’t put on a helmet without having a panic attack.”

  Michael winced. “Sorry,” Marika said. “So why are you out here, then?”

  That was a question Michael had never really considered. He supposed that he could just give up and spend his life inside the dome. He tried to think of the simplest explanation.

  “Well, my dad is a Rescue Service officer.”

  Marika nodded. “I can see how that would make things complicated.”

  “What about you? Why are you taking the advanced test?”

  “Honestly, I don’t really like being out here at all,” she said. “I’d rather be back in the school geology lab. But the internships at the colony research center require an advanced cert so they can send us out to collect samples.”

  Soon the colony had disappeared entirely and they were completely alone, with nothing but reddish-brown dirt in all directions. The wheels of the rover were able to sense and adapt to any rocks smaller than a soccer ball, and Kyle did a good job steering around all of the larger boulders or gullies that would have given the rover trouble.

  Beecher, on the other hand, seemed to have never driven a rover before in his life. When it was his turn to drive, he zigzagged back and forth over the landscape, avoiding obstacles that Michael wasn’t sure were actually there and yet still managing to hit larger rocks that made the rover bounce up and down. When Randall finally told him to stop the rover, Marika gave such a comic sigh of relief that Michael had to bite his lip to keep from laughing out loud.

  Marika climbed forward into the driver’s seat. Beecher elbowed his way past the other kids and slumped down next to Michael without fastening his seat belt. Michael kept his face straight and his eyes ahead.

  When Marika and Vivien had both completed the driving test to Randall’s satisfaction, he turned back and nodded at Michael. “You want to try?”

  It was clear Randall was just being polite, since rover driving certainly wasn’t a part of the basic test. Michael was about to tell him no when Beecher spoke up.

  “Him? I’ll bet he can’t even reach the steering wheel.”

  Michael glared at him and started to climb up front. “I can drive better than you.”

  He’d driven smaller rovers with his dad, though of course that had been years ago. But the controls were all the same, weren’t they? He slid the seat forward so he could reach the pedals, and Beecher chuckled in amusement. Michael ignored him and shifted the rover into drive and went through Randall’s exercises without any trouble.

  “It’s like being driven around by a leprechaun,” Beecher called from the back seat. “Maybe he can find us a pot o’ gold.”

  Michael glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Beecher smirking at him. He pushed down on the throttle pedal and sped up to twenty kilometers per hour. He held it there for a few seconds, and then he jammed his foot on the brake.

  “Aah!” Beecher shouted. He hit the seat in front of him with a loud thump and crashed down onto the floor.

  Randall grabbed the dashboard to brace himself. He frowned at Michael.

  “Sorry,” Michael mumbled, staring at the steering wheel. “Thought I saw a rainbow.”

  A flicker of amusement flashed across Randall’s face. He turned around in his seat. “Is everyone okay back there?”

  Beecher climbed back into his seat and muttered something inaudible.

  “That, people, is why you always wear your safety harness,” Randall said. “Michael, swap seats with me.”

  Randall climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the rover north. He drove quickly, speeding around a series of small hills and into a long, wide valley.

  “Quiz time,” he said over the radio. “Vivien. What’s the vapor pressure of water at zero degrees? Quickly, now.”

  “Six hundred pascals?” Vivien said.

  “Six eleven,” Randall corrected. “Beecher. How do you recognize a static slope?”

  Randall led them through a whole series of questions. What’s the rule of thumb for knowing whether water will freeze or sublimate? What’s the blood toxicity level for carbon monoxide? Carbon dioxide? Methane? What are the symptoms of decompression sickness? When would you switch a suit to hyperbaric mode? If a student didn’t know the answer right away, Randall would bark another name. To Michael, this part of the test was the easiest so far—if there was anything he knew well, it was science.

  “Come on, guys, you should know this,” he said several times. And then, often as not—“Michael, help them out.”

  They reached a narrow trail and followed it for half a kilometer until it opened up into a circular area about twenty meters across. Environment suit helmets were laid out on the ground in neat rows. They climbed out of the rover and stood at the edge of the clearing.

  “Does anyone know where we are?” Randall asked.

  “This is one of the colony cemeteries,” Marika said. “The helmets are where they’ve buried people’s ashes.”

  The dusty helmets stared back at Michael like the heads of decapitated corpses. His skin felt clammy and cold. He folded his arms and looked dow
n at the ground.

  “That’s right,” Randall said. “It’s a good place to remind you of all the ways Mars can kill you.”

  He gathered a handful of pebbles and knelt down. “First: air poisoning.” He dropped one of the rocks on the ground. “A tear in your suit, a busted air unit, or a saturated filter. If it’s fast, CO2 poisoning will kill you in minutes. If it’s slow, it’ll be headaches, vomiting, and hallucinations. And then it will kill you.”

  Michael shifted his feet uneasily. The air in his suit suddenly seemed stale. He checked the gauges on his wrist display and forced himself to take a deep breath. Everything was fine. The test was almost over. He just had to make it back to the colony and everything would be fine.

  “Hypothermia.” Randall dropped another pebble. “It’s minus sixty Celsius right now, and without proper heating systems, you’ll freeze to death in minutes.”

  Michael grimaced. Why was Randall going through all of this, here of all places? Did they really need to be reminded of how dangerous Mars was?

  Randall added another rock. “Radiation. We’ve got the magnetic field shielding the planet now, and there’s a lining in your suit that’ll give you some protection, too. But even just a few years ago, getting caught out in the open in a flare like this would mean radiation poisoning in a bad way. Major organ shutdown, loss of consciousness, and death.”

  He tossed down the final rock. “Last one: old age. If you’re lucky, you’ll die out here under the sun and sky. These suits are the best coffins ever made.”

  A chill went through Michael’s spine. His eyes were drawn irresistibly to the rows of helmets. Without even meaning to, he counted them: eight rows of twenty-two helmets. One hundred seventy-six people. How many of them had died peacefully in their beds? How many had died out here on the surface, from hypothermia or air poisoning or any of the rest?

  Michael realized that while he’d been staring at the helmets, Randall had been giving them their next set of instructions. Something about navigation satellites?