by John Olson
The last few days had been priceless. They’d huddled together in the stairwell, talking little, but saying much. Valkerie had talked about her alcoholic mother and cried. Lex told them about finding a picture of the father she’d never known—and burning it. Kennedy had talked about growing up in the South in a family that still thought the wrong side won the War Between the States. And Bob had told them all about Sarah.
The talking had brought them all closer together. Slowly, slowly. Imperceptibly.
Bob’s phone started drifting toward the wall. That told him the burn had worked. He grabbed the phone and stuffed it in his pocket.
There was one more thing Bob wanted to talk about. With Valkerie. Just her.
But there hadn’t been a convenient time, and now it was too late. He’d waited too long. If they burned up on entry, if the parachutes failed, if Kennedy hovered too long and they ran out of bipropellant before touching down, if the fuel cells ran out, if any of a thousand failure modes went poof, then Bob would never be able to tell her.
He punched the buttons to begin bringing in the solar panel. From now on, they’d be living on whatever power they’d managed to save up in the fuel cells—maybe a couple hours’ worth.
Something blurred Bob’s vision. He brushed at his eyes madly. He had a job to do. Kaggo the Robot had to perform. There wasn’t time to be human.
* * *
Thursday, July 3, Year Three, 10:30 A.M.
Valkerie
Valkerie checked the patches on the shrapnel punctures in Bob’s EVA suit. This was the fourth time she had checked it today. She hoped they held. Maybe she should reconsider and do the EVA herself. If one of the patches failed ... no, it was too late now. There wasn’t enough time to modify the oxygen-transfer hose. Besides, NASA had put a lot of work into the patch kits. Bob would be fine. He was strong, and he knew the workings of the rover better than anyone.
“Is that the last one?” Valkerie could barely hear Lex’s whisper through her breather.
“I sure hope so. Here, see if you can find any more of those little stainless-steel splinters.” Valkerie pushed Bob’s suit across the stairwell.
Lex took it with a melancholy nod and bent over it with a magnifying glass.
“Lex, did you know that Bob almost died while I was bringing in the capsule’s LOX tank? He refused to breathe from Kennedy’s suit, because he was afraid fifty-eight minutes wasn’t going to be enough. He was willing to sacrifice himself to give us a better chance.”
“Bob is a ... special guy,” Lex whispered back. “I’m not surprised.”
“The guys want us to take some of the oxygen from their EVA suits for our breathers—so we’ll all have equal amounts.” Valkerie paused. Did she dare go on? “But ... I’ve been thinking. What if they don’t have enough? Bob and Kennedy are going to be weak and dizzy once they hit Mars gravity. I don’t think they have any idea how hard it’s going to be. What if they run out of oxygen? Then we’ll all be dead. For sure.”
Lex nodded slowly. “We have to ... give them our share.” Her whisper was barely audible.
Valkerie moved across the stairwell and put her arm around Lex. “Don’t worry. It’ll be all right. I’ve—”
Lex pulled away from Valkerie. “I’m not afraid. I knew the risks when I signed onto this mission. I just wish ...” Lex buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook.
Valkerie reached a hand out to Lex’s shoulder but drew it back again. She felt so helpless. What could she do? She was the last person that Lex would want to comfort her.
“I just wish we could send a message home. Just one message ...”
Valkerie nodded and took a deep breath, steeling herself to ask the question that she had been putting off for so long. “You want to send a message to Josh, don’t you?”
Lex looked up. “What?”
“You’re in love with Josh, aren’t you? I’m so sorry. I should have known. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. I never would have—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Lex, you have to believe me. If I had known you were interested in Josh, I never would have gone out with him. I’m really sorry.”
“Josh and I are just friends. I’m certainly not in love with him.”
“Well, then who ... I mean, why do you want to send back a message?”
Lex lowered her head. She was silent for several minutes. Valkerie bit her lip, watching the struggle that played across Lex’s dimly lit features.
“My ... husband,” she said at last.
“Your husband!” Valkerie gasped. “I didn’t know you were married.”
“Nobody does,” Lex admitted to the floor. “We kept it a secret. They wouldn’t take married people in the Ares program. I didn’t want to lose Mars, but it wasn’t just me. I did it for his career too ... He was moving up in rank so fast, and he needed to be able to go wherever they sent him.”
“The officer at the last visitation,” Valkerie said. “I was wondering why he left without talking to anybody.”
Lex nodded. Her brow was creased with pain. “We had a fight. It was my fault. I insisted that we give each other freedom. But when he finally ... when he ... took me up on it, I ...” Lex buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
Valkerie pulled Lex close and held her gently as she cried.
After a time, Lex grew quiet and finally pulled away.
“Lex, I can check the suits. Go write a letter. I’ll convince Bob to let us send it.”
Lex sniffled. “Thank you, but I’m okay. I’ve already written a long one—just in case.” Lex retrieved Bob’s EVA suit and fell to examining it with the magnifying glass.
“Lex, maybe this is none of my business, but when we searched your cabin, I noticed ...”
Lex looked up at Valkerie.
“I’m sorry. It’s really none of my business.”
“No, it’s okay. What’s your question?”
“Well, Flight Med put me on birth-control pills, but I ...”
Lex pushed Bob’s suit away. “I was such a fool. I wanted so bad to make something of myself. As soon as I got out of college ... the first thing I did was … have an operation.”
“And now?”
“And now ... I think you and I both know what’s really important. And it’s not something I’m likely to find on Mars.”
Valkerie nodded slowly and turned to leave.
“What about you? Are you in love with Josh?” Lex whispered.
Valkerie turned around at the hatch and considered Lex’s question. “No ... I mean, I like him well enough, and maybe for a while I think I was trying to make myself like him, but now ...” She shrugged. “Now I’m definitely not in love ... with him.”
“Good,” Lex said with relief.
“What do you mean, good? What’s wrong with me liking Josh?”
“Well, for one, he’s dating Karla Faust.”
“The Karla Faust—the one at Stanford?”
Lex nodded. “I guess you would know her work.”
“Well, of course. Bob told me once that Josh had a girlfriend in Antarctica, but he didn’t tell me it was her. And I thought Bob was just ... making it all up. Anyway, Josh told me he broke up with her a long time ago.”
“Well, he never told me. Not that I’m questioning him. Karla wasn’t his type at all. I always assumed he was stringing her along because he needed help with his research.”
“Research?”
“Yeah. She brought him back all kinds of specimens to practice on.”
“Specimens? From Antarctica?”
“Yeah. Bacteria and stuff. They were supposed to be drought-resistant. Didn’t he ever show you any of his work?”
Valkerie could see Josh’s lab in her mind’s eye. A PCR thermal cycler. Dozens of parafilmed Petri dishes. A stainless-steel canister.
Stainless steel?
Valkerie grabbed Lex’s arm, her brain suddenly in high gear.
“Valkerie? What�
�s wrong?”
Valkerie kicked off the wall and dove through the hatch. “Bob!”
* * *
Thursday, July 3, Year Three, 11:15 A.M.
Bob
Bob ticked off the last item on his checklist and looked at the time. Thirty minutes to spare. “Okay, Hampster. She’s good to fly. Your move, buddy.”
Kennedy gave him a thumbs-up. “I’ve got Lex’s seat set up downstairs, and the others are locked down over in the command center. Better get the girls and help them strap in. Lex is going to need a lot of help.”
“Roger on that.” Bob started toward the stairwell. Lex would ride on the lower deck so they wouldn’t have to carry her down the stairs after the landing. It was going to be tough getting used to gravity. Bob wondered if maybe they should’ve tried to set up all the seats on the lower deck. Oh, well ... maybe after they finished getting Lex situated, he would get a chance to talk to Valkerie alone in the stairwell. Maybe.
Before he reached the hatch, it flew open. Valkerie sailed out, her face flushed.
“Bob, listen, I’ve got something to tell you.”
“I’ve got something to tell you too. I—”
“Bob, I know who the saboteur is.”
“You ... what?” Bob stared at her.
Lex drifted out of the stairwell, pushing feebly off the walls. “Valkerie, are you sure about this?”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Valkerie’s face shone. “We don’t have much time, so just listen, everyone. After the explosion, we detected stainless-steel chips embedded in Bob’s suit, right? And nobody knew where they came from, because there isn’t any stainless steel out there on the hull. It’s all composites. You with me so far?”
“Keep going,” Bob said.
“And Josh has a girlfriend in Antarctica. Lex was just telling me about her—”
“Karla Faust. I told you about her a long time ago,” Bob said. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“We don’t have time!” Valkerie said. “Just listen. I saw a stainless-steel cylinder in Josh’s lab once. A small one, but large enough to hold a few hundred cc’s of biosample.”
“We’ve got to get Lex strapped in. We’re running out of time.” Kennedy took hold of Lex and started to move her toward the stairwell.
Bob helped Kennedy maneuver Lex through the hatch. “Keep talking, we’re listening.”
Valkerie followed Bob and Kennedy downstairs and helped them guide Lex to her seat. “Okay, it’s simple, really. Josh once asked me what I thought of life on Mars—whether we’d find it. I said I doubted it, but I didn’t know. I remember now how urgent he seemed to think it was. Said if we didn’t find life, the Ares program would crash and burn, and NASA wouldn’t survive.”
“That’s ... nuts,” Lex whispered. “Valkerie, are you going to send my message?”
“I’m getting to that.” Valkerie pulled a strap over Lex’s head and cinched it down tight. “But listen. Josh’s girlfriend is a microbial ecologist, a real heavy hitter. She specializes in hardy life forms in Antarctica. They’re drought-resistant. Ergo, radiation-resistant.”
“How does that follow?” Bob handed Valkerie a side strap.
“It’s the same thing, really,” Valkerie said. “Desiccation damages DNA in much the same way that radiation does. The same systems that repair DNA after freeze-drying can repair DNA after exposure to radiation. See? Josh told me once that if we didn’t find life on Mars, the mission was dead. Now here’s where the guesswork starts, and I admit it’s a guess, but it’s plausible. Suppose he decided to bring along some insurance, just to make sure he found what he needed. What NASA needed.”
“That’s crazy,” Bob said. “Somebody would figure it out eventually.”
“Maybe not,” Valkerie said. “People would probably argue for an Earth-to-Mars transfer via meteorite blast—you know, the reverse of the process that sometimes brings Mars rocks to Earth. Anyway, it would buy him some time—years, maybe. In the meantime, maybe somebody would find the real McCoy. I’m just guessing here, but my gut tells me it’s right. Josh loves NASA. He’d do anything to save it.”
“He’d kill us to save NASA?” Bob shook his head. “Josh is a zealot—sure. But he’s not a maniac. Not a murderer.”
“No, you dummy! Of course not! He never intended that thing to go off in space. That had to be an accident. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was built to arm itself after the solar panels got reeled in. He never expected us to do a test deployment in low-Earth orbit, then bring them back in, then redeploy. Anyway, just supposing I’m right, there are only two bays where he could have hidden his goodies.”
“The solar-panel deployment bays,” Bob said.
“Right. Everything deploys out of those two bays. The solar panels. The parachutes. The inflatable aerobrakes. Everything. I’m betting he stuffed in that little stainless-steel cylinder with some pyros set to go off just before landing. He wanted to seed the area with life. And then we’d find it. He wasn’t counting on us blowing it up out in deep space. And now the whole ship is infected with this weird bacteria. Radiation-resistant bacteria. You guys still following me?”
“So ... there was no saboteur,” Bob said.
“Right. It was an accident. Nobody on Earth ever tried to kill us. Now do you get it?”
Bob nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Valkerie pushed off toward the lower deck’s CommConsole. “Can I turn the transmitter on from here?”
“Why would you want to do that?” Bob said. “We can’t spare the power.”
“Twenty seconds,” Valkerie said. “Tell me we haven’t got twenty seconds to send a message. If we don’t survive the landing, there are people on earth who deserve to hear our final words.”
Bob flicked the switches to power up the radio. “Okay. Maybe we can spare a minute.”
Valkerie grabbed the microphone.
“Houston, this is Ares 10,” Valkerie said. “We are twenty minutes from entering the Mars atmosphere. We are alive and well and transmitting final words before landing.” She handed the mike to Kennedy.
“This is Kennedy Hampton, CDR of Ares 10. We have very little oxygen but hope to transfer to base camp immediately upon landing. The operation has a roughly fifty-fifty chance for success. For the record, the crew has been exceptional—every one of them.”
Valkerie handed the mike to Bob. He took it and stammered. “Um ... well, this is Bob Kaganovski. Um ... live long and prosper.” What a stupid thing to say.
Valkerie took the mike. “Valkerie Jansen here. We love you all, and we’re sorry we’ve been on radio silence for the last two weeks. We kind of freaked out when we saw you trying to query the backup aerobrake-deployment system. Don’t worry, guys, it was fine, but it doesn’t matter because we’ll be using the primary. Anyway, we now know that we have nothing to fear from any of you. Hugs to you, Josh Bennett. We know how desperately you wanted this mission to succeed, and the extraordinary steps you took to make it so. Please don’t blame yourself if ... something happens to us. We know you did everything you could, and we love you. Alexis Ohta has something very special for someone.” She held the mike down to Lex’s lips.
Lex swallowed hard. “To my husband, Ronald J. Anderson, United States Air Force ... I love you. I love you. I love you.” Her eyes fell shut. Kennedy and Bob gasped.
Valkerie took the mike and floated back toward the CommConsole. “We’re about to land. We’ll catch you on the flip side in about an hour.” She shut the radio off.
“Okay, kiddies.” Kennedy pushed off for the stairwell. “Fifteen minutes till the ride begins.”
* * *
Thursday, July 3, Year Three, 11:45 A.M.
Nate
Nate’s biggest fear yesterday was that he’d break down in front of the cameras. He knew now that he had nothing to fear on that score. The hot TV lights did nothing to warm the freezing cold in his gut. We lost ‘em.
It was July third, one day short of the day he’d been dreaming abo
ut for the last eight years. Now the starlight had faded to ashes.
Thanks to Newton’s equations, Nate knew exactly where his crew was—just entering the Martian atmosphere. But they were going to burn up when they reached it. Why, oh why, had they broken contact two weeks ago? Radio malfunction? Paranoia? Or was it Kennedy?
Steven Perez stepped to the podium.
Nate knew what the press could only suspect. Perez was going to resign over this. Nate would too, of course, but he’d been planning on taking early retirement when the mission ended anyway, so it was no skin off his nose. But Perez was still young. This would destroy his career. And worse, it would keep them both awake every night for the rest of their lives.
“Fellow Americans,” Perez began. His eyes glistened with real tears.
Perez is still a person, the lucky slob.
“Ares 10 is just now passing the point beyond which we can no longer talk to her. We know that neither aerobrake-deployment system on the ship is functional. Two weeks ago, we lost radio contact with the ship, for reasons unknown. It may be an equipment malfunction. It may be simple paranoia. Or it may be that they chose to end it all. What seems certain is that, at this moment, the ship is reaching Mars and will burn up in the thin atmosphere of an alien planet. Please join with me in four minutes of silence in honor of Kennedy Hampton, Alexis Ohta, Robert Kaganovski, and Valkerie Jansen—two men and two women who have shared their lives with us throughout their remarkable journey. Right now, their only hope of survival is a miracle.”
Perez bowed his head.
Nate could see his lips moving. Praying for that miracle?
Nate tipped his head down, but kept his eyes open. The only miracles he believed in were the kind his engineers pulled out of their hats. Movement caught his eye. He looked up.
Josh Bennett was waving excitedly from backstage.
Nate stood up and tiptoed out as quietly as he could.