In the Red

by Christopher Swiedler

  “No,” she said. “Though it doesn’t help that you keep muttering random numbers to yourself.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Any idea how long it will be till the power comes on?”

  “The sun came up thirty minutes ago. So it should be . . .” He paused briefly as the lights flickered on. “Right about now, actually.”

  “Michael Prasad, you truly are a genius,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  It took another fifteen minutes before the filters in the homestead had scrubbed the air enough for it to be breathable. Michael and Lilith heated up three pouches of vegetable curry while Randall checked over the electrical systems. Finally he declared that the air was “good enough” and they took off their helmets and ate ravenously.

  “Do you think the power will stay on until tonight?” Lilith asked.

  “It’ll last till the sun goes down,” Randall said. “But not much longer than that.”

  Lilith groaned. “So we’re sleeping in our helmets again?”

  “That’s one option,” Randall said slowly. He turned toward Michael. “The other is that we fix up that jumpship and fly it to Milankovic.”

  “Fly it?” Michael repeated. “You mean, tonight?”

  Randall nodded. “As soon as the sun goes down—if you’re still sure that you can handle the navigation.”

  Michael had a sudden nervous feeling in the pit of his stomach. It had been one thing to think about a ballistic course as a theoretical exercise. The math wasn’t that complicated—nineteenth-century artillery crews had done it long before computers had been invented. But even if the principle was the same, there was a big difference between firing off a mortar shell and hand-piloting a jumpship. Especially one that the three of them would be flying on.

  “Two days ago you were all fired up about how dangerous that jumpship is,” Lilith said. “Now you’re in a hurry to fly it out of here?”

  Randall was silent for a moment. “The situation has changed. If Michael can handle the navigation, then I think it’s our best bet.”

  “He can handle it,” Lilith said, sounding much more confident than Michael felt at the moment. “Right?”

  The two of them looked at him expectantly. Michael took a deep breath and tried to ignore the anxiety that was building up deep inside him.

  “Of course,” he said. “No problem.”

  It felt strange to think that soon they’d be leaving this place behind. They’d been here only a few days, and for most of that time he’d been cold, hungry, and uncomfortable, but Michael had grown oddly attached to the little homestead. He did his best to clean up while Lilith collected supplies.

  “Fourteen packets of expired energy gel and twenty-two pouches of expired water,” Lilith said, coming out of a storeroom with a large box. “Plus two expired medical kits in case we break a leg or something.”

  “I wonder if we should leave a note,” Michael said. “Even though it’d probably be twenty years before anyone read it.”

  “That’s taken care of,” Lilith said, tearing a few sheets out of a notebook. “I’ve been keeping a log ever since we got here.”

  “You have?”

  Lilith shrugged. “Nothing else to do but read textbooks and fifty-year-old romance novels. Anyway, I wanted to leave some kind of record of what happened to us.”

  “If we don’t make it back, you mean,” Michael said.

  “Yeah. Except that’s not going to happen, because that crazy-smart brain of yours is going to get us to Milankovic, where I am going to eat everything in the world other than vegetable curry and energy gel.”

  “The ship is prepped,” Randall said, poking his head into the kitchen. “Are you ready?”

  “As we’ll ever be,” Lilith said.

  As he followed Randall and Lilith back toward the hangar, Michael’s stomach started to churn. Was this really the right thing to do? Maybe if they just set up a new beacon and stayed in the homestead, someone would be here soon to rescue them.

  You’ll be fine, he thought grimly. Maybe you can’t do anything else, but you can do math, right?

  The sun had just set, and the sky was a deep reddish-brown that was quickly fading to black. Randall had already moved the ship out onto the little landing pad outside the hangar. The preheat cycle of the engines had melted a wide, slushy circle in the ice that had collected on the pad. They waded out to the boarding ladder and climbed inside. Michael sat in the copilot’s station, and Lilith unfolded one of the jump seats on the rear cabin wall. Randall pulled three hypo-injector tubes out of his pocket and stuffed them into the bag with the medical supplies.

  “What are those for?” Lilith asked.

  He shoved the kit into a small recess on the rear cabin wall. “Radiation poisoning is not a pleasant way to go. If we get stuck out there, I want a backup option.”

  Michael cocked his head and frowned. “So those will help? What’s in them?”

  “Two hundred milligrams of pseudomorphine for each of us,” Randall said. “Enough to make it quick and painless.”

  “Oh,” Lilith said. She and Michael exchanged a look. Radiation poisoning wasn’t a pleasant thought. But the idea of needing a “backup option” wasn’t pleasant, either.

  Michael unfolded the scrap of paper where he’d written his final course. He’d gone over his calculations a half dozen times. Everything was correct, mathematically speaking. But real life wasn’t the same as mathematics. Even if Randall got the thrust exactly right, they weren’t going to be flying on a perfect parabolic curve. The engines were old. The attitude rockets might not be able to get the nose of the ship pointing in the exact direction they needed. And there was the wind to take into account, and . . .

  “Time for that trajectory,” Randall said as he strapped himself into the pilot’s seat.

  Michael nodded and handed the slip of paper to him. Randall looked it over and glanced back at Lilith. She gave a thumbs-up. “All good back here.”

  Randall flipped on the power. The pilot’s and copilot’s screens flashed through a boot-up sequence, and then they displayed an error message. No navigation satellites available. The message was bright and bold and red, as if to make it perfectly clear how stupid it was to fly a jumpship without a working nav computer. Michael wondered what the ship’s original programmers would say if they knew someone was going to fly a course that had been hand calculated by a twelve-year-old kid.

  A sharp tremor ran through the ship, and Michael jerked upright in his seat. He settled back down again awkwardly as he realized that it was just Randall starting the main engine.

  “You okay?” Randall asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  Except that he wasn’t. A cold drop of sweat ran down the back of his neck. He tried to take deep, slow breaths, but an all-too-familiar feeling of inescapable terror was building up at the back of his mind.

  No. Not now. This couldn’t happen to him now.

  He’d almost forgotten what a panic attack was like. His chest felt as if someone were squeezing him in a vise. He leaned forward and grabbed the copilot’s controls to steady himself.

  I can’t I can’t I can’t

  “Michael?”

  The voice was so distant that he wasn’t sure whether it was Randall or Lilith. Darkness crept in around the corners of his vision until he could hardly see anything other than the control panel in front of him. The only sound he could hear was the pounding of his own heartbeat. Suddenly there was nothing in the world more important than getting off the ship. He unbuckled his harness and ran toward the hatchway.

  Behind him, he heard Randall and Lilith shouting. He jumped down onto the landing pad and sprinted for the airlock at the back of the hangar. As soon as he was inside, he jerked open the collar of his helmet and tore it off his head. He sat down with his back against the wall and sucked in deep lungfuls of air.

  The light on the airlock flashed and the door slid open. Lilith ran to him and knelt down. “What h
appened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, clenching his eyes shut so that he wouldn’t have to see the disappointment on her face. “I’m so sorry, Lil. I can’t do it.”

  14

  MICHAEL WOKE THE next morning feeling as if he’d slept for a hundred years and could sleep for a hundred more. He sat up and looked around blearily. The room was dark, but a light down the hallway meant that the sun had risen and the solar panels were providing power. He checked the air quality on his wrist display and found that the oxygen levels were even lower than they’d been the previous morning. He rolled his neck and shoulders to work out the kinks. How long would it be before he could sleep without a helmet?

  He wished he could give Lilith and Randall some kind of reason for why he’d panicked yesterday. But he couldn’t even explain why being on that jumpship had been so frightening. He’d felt exactly the same way as when he’d had his very first panic attack, back when he was ten. Except that instead of his brain deciding that putting on an environment suit would kill him, this time it had freaked out over sitting in the cockpit of a jumpship. It didn’t make sense.

  He opened the door and headed down to the kitchen. Lilith was sitting at the table with her feet propped up, reading on her screen. She glanced up at him and gave a little nod.

  “Breakfast will be ready in a bit. Anything you want as long as it’s vegetable curry.”

  He filled up a water pouch at the sink and drank it through the port in his helmet. It tasted warm and metallic, but he didn’t really care. He sat down and laid his head on the table. Maybe he did need more sleep.

  “You know, I’ve been reading up on environment suit anxiety,” Lilith said.

  Michael looked up at her and frowned. “You have?”

  “Yep. And I’ve come to the conclusion that you don’t actually have it.”

  “You think that I don’t have suit anxiety?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Lilith—”

  “Don’t get me wrong, you’ve clearly got some kind of panic disorder,” she said, holding up her hands. “But look at it this way—what’s the defining characteristic of suit anxiety?”

  “Anxiety while wearing a suit?”

  “Anxiety while wearing a suit!” she exclaimed, banging her fist on the table. “Exhibit A: Michael Prasad, who has now spent approximately umpty-two hours in a suit, and—if it please the court—is wearing one at this precise minute, without any ill effects whatsoever.”

  Michael had to admit that she had a point. Until yesterday, he hadn’t had a panic attack since he’d gone searching for her back in the cave. “Okay, Dr. Colson. If it isn’t being in an environment suit that makes me panic, what is it?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? So let’s start at the beginning. Tell me about your very first panic attack. You said it happened when you tried to take the suit test?”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “I’d been out onto the surface fifty or sixty times already by then. It was going to be a piece of cake.”

  “When did it start? Out on the surface, or when you were in the prep room putting on your suit?”

  He thought for a moment. “Well, neither, actually. I think it really started the night before the test. I felt this kind of dread, like I knew something was going to go wrong.”

  “The night before,” she mused. “That’s interesting. Not quite what you’d expect, is it? That you would start feeling suit anxiety twelve hours before you put on a suit?”

  “I suppose.”

  “After that, your dad kept trying to take you outside?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Five or six times. But I never even made it out of the airlock.”

  “Let’s jump forward to a few days ago, when you took the test again. You were fine out on the surface, right? Up until the end?”

  “I was a little anxious,” he said. “But it wasn’t too bad until the navigation section.”

  “Do you remember what you were feeling right before you started to panic?”

  He shrugged. “I guess I was nervous I was going to fail the test.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “And what about the other night on the rover?”

  “I had a dream,” he said, thinking back. “A nightmare, I guess. About my dad taking me outside, over and over.”

  “Then you woke up, and blammo.” She nodded. “I think we’re getting somewhere. Now, tell me about yesterday.”

  “Well, yesterday was different,” he said. “I was doing fine until we got onto the jumpship. I gave Randall my calculations, and suddenly . . .”

  “Blammo?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Blammo. So, Dr. Colson, what’s your diagnosis?”

  She leaned back in her seat and pressed the tips of her fingers together. “Well, I don’t think it’s the suit that makes you panic,” she said. “I think it’s the pressure.”

  He looked at her confusedly. “I always set the air pressure to—”

  “No,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I mean the pressure. On you. Like when you took the test the first time, it was supposed to be a walk in the park, right? You’re Michael Prasad, Boy Genius of Mars. You weren’t allowed to fail.”

  “I failed because I couldn’t fail?” Michael said doubtfully.

  “It does sound kind of crazy, doesn’t it?” Lilith said. “But it fits. How did you feel afterward?”

  Michael tried to remember. “Like it was the end of the world. Like I’d let everyone down.” Most of all, like he’d let his dad down.

  “And how did you feel yesterday, after your panic attack on the jumpship?” she asked. “Was it the same?”

  “Except even worse, because if I screwed up . . .” He trailed off. This time, if he screwed up, people would die.

  “I wish I knew what to say to make you stop feeling that pressure. All I can really tell you is that it’s okay to fail,” Lilith said. “It’s okay to not have all the answers. People aren’t going to see you any differently. You’re still you.”

  He nodded. What she was saying made sense, but it still didn’t feel okay.

  Lilith stood up and headed toward the storeroom. When she reached the doorway, she stopped and turned back toward him.

  “I guess what I mean is that if I had to pick anyone in the world to navigate that ship, it would be you. But if I had to pick anyone in the world to not navigate that ship, it would still be you.”

  Michael turned this over in his head, trying to figure out what she meant. Why would she want to be here with him, instead of with someone who could actually get them home? Hypothesis looking likely: sometimes girls say things just to confuse you.

  Michael’s stomach rebelled against the idea of another bowl of vegetable curry, so he drank some energy gel and wandered through the hallways at the back of the homestead until he found Randall hunched over a circuit board in a makeshift workshop. Electronic parts, wires, tubes, and plastic containers were scattered over a large table. A small lantern cast long shadows across the room. Randall’s helmet was sitting on the table next to him.

  “Is the air good to breathe already?” Michael asked.

  Randall straightened up quickly and glanced back at him. “It’s not too bad. Might give you a little headache. Probably best to wait a little longer.”

  Michael frowned. If the air quality was still bad enough to give you a headache, why wasn’t Randall still wearing his helmet too? “What are you working on?”

  “Nothing, really. Just fiddling.”

  Michael picked up a flat metal cylinder and inspected it. It was obviously old, but looked to be in good shape. “This is an industrial air filter, isn’t it?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Randall bent back down over the table and stared at the wires coming out of the circuit board.

  “How many of these do we have?”

  “About forty,” Randall said.

  Michael understood Randall’s frustrated expression. Forty air filters that could make all the air in the entire
homestead breathable, but not enough sunlight to power them. Three suits with their own internal power sources, but not enough portable filters to run them. Michael noticed a small fusion battery on the floor, the sort that would power a tram car or a piece of heavy machinery. “You’re trying to rig one of them up,” he said. “Is it working?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do you need any help?”

  “How well do you understand metal-organic CO2 absorption systems?”

  “Not very well,” Michael admitted.

  “Me neither,” Randall said. “Meaning the chances I’m going to get this to work are somewhere south of five percent. But it’s better than staring at the wall.”

  Suddenly Michael realized what was odd about Randall’s suit—his air vest was lying flat and empty against his chest, which meant not only had he used up his reserves, but his suit filter wasn’t working well enough to refill the vest with liquid oxygen. Michael leaned over Randall’s shoulder until he caught a glimpse of his wrist screen. His skin went cold. Filter 94% saturated, it read. Estimated 22 hours remaining.

  “Do you mind?” Randall said, turning his arm so that his wrist display was hidden. “I’m trying to work here.”

  “Sorry,” Michael mumbled. He paused for a moment. “So everything is okay with your suit?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Randall said without turning around. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure?” Michael asked.

  “I may not know much about industrial-strength filters,” Randall snapped, “but I know how to read my suit diagnostics. Now would you please give me a little space?”

  Michael backed away, trying not to give any indication that he’d noticed the warning message. Why didn’t Randall want them to know that his filter was starting to go bad? Was he going to just let himself run out of air?

  He stared at Randall, still hunched over the worktable. They couldn’t let that happen. Somehow, they were going to find a way to leave—tonight.

  15

  ROLLED BACK INSIDE the hangar, the jumpship somehow looked larger than it had out on the landing pad. The hatchway above the boarding ladder was still hanging open. Outside the hangar, the setting sun had turned the sky into a wash of red and purple and blue.