by ASF
Six days after the accident, the three of us were marched into a conference room on the top floor of the company’s offices, where a half-dozen or so suits and Dr. Heiney sat on either side of a long, black table, at the other end of which was seated Skycorp’s CEO and president. After spending the next ten minutes ripping us apart, he told us what we’d expected to hear anyway: we weren’t going to Mars, and we could collect our severance checks on the way out the door.
And that was it. Our space careers were over.
Or so we thought.
I still had friends in the company and at NASA, and over the next eighteen months or so, I heard about what happened to the Alpha, Gamma, and Theta teams. As it turned out, Team Zulu’s performance turned out to be the high-water mark. At least Miguel, Ron-Jon, and I got along together; the other teams were so high-strung, their members were at each other’s throats before the first four weeks of their respective missions were over. And when Team Gamma had an accident of their own—an oxygen tank exploded—they panicked so badly that Huntsville had to order them into the REV, which was then piloted to the ground by remote control. Only three of the nine guys on those teams ended up going to Mars; NASA had to pull together the rest of the Ares II crew from other sources, and those people were not put aboard the Mess first. The station was deorbited shortly after that, and the last I heard of Dr. Heiney, the old quack was teaching Psych 101 at a community college somewhere in Louisiana.
Ares II got safely to Mars and back again, though, and so did Ares III. But after that, Skycorp took over the Mars exploration effort. Together with a Japanese company, Uchu-Hiko, they announced their intent to establish a permanent settlement near Arsia Mons. I guess someone must have rethought the criteria by which they picked the people who’d colonize Mars, because about six months after that I got a call from Skycorp’s HR office, asking if I’d be interested in coming in for an interview.
I wasn’t. By then, I’d married and found a new career as a freelance writer. And to tell the truth, I was also still burned about the way we’d been treated. So I turned them down, albeit more politely than they deserved, and went on my way.
But Miguel and Ron-Jon didn’t. And that’s why today I received an e-card from them: a picture of the two guys, their hands around the other guy’s throat, their tongues hanging out of their mouths as they mug for the camera. The inscription is a cliché—Having a wonderful time, wish you were here—but it’s what is in the background that got my attention: a big window, and on the other side of it, a desert of red and rocky sand.
In the end, the Zoo Team managed to get to Mars, in spite of itself. Maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be.
Copyright © 2010 Allen M. Steele
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Short Stories
Contamination
Different folks can have different opinions, but they may not all be able to act on them. . . .
Jay Werkheiser
Illustrated by Vincent Di Fate
Ari allowed his skimmer to brush the outer edge of Nouvelle Terre’s atmos-phere. He tried to imagine air jostling the light nanofiber support frame, whistling through the skimmer’s magsails. Excitement pulsed through his veins at the thought of being so close to the blue and white surface, perhaps closer than any human had ever dared. Nothing but his skinsuit and a few hundred kilometers of atmosphere separated him from the living, breathing landscape below. He spread his arms and legs, trying to feel the minuscule tug of atmospheric drag.
Is that what wind feels like?
His faceplate HUD showed a ripple in the magsail’s yaw loop. The threat of a coil collapse brought his mind back into focus, and he hiked up the field strength to gain some altitude. He savored every precious minute the skimmer took to climb away from the atmosphere. Nouvelle Terre’s secondary sun climbed over the horizon, visible only because the primary sun hadn’t yet risen. He scanned the starry sky, taking advantage of the view before primary sunrise darkened his faceplate. Earth’s distant sun was almost directly overhead, a pinpoint at the tail of a zig-zag of stars. The drive flare that cut across the constellation chilled his good mood. After a generation of silence, what could the Earth people possibly want?
Bah. Figuring that out was the job of bureaucrats. Ari preferred jockeying around with a skimmer, launching and retrieving microprobes, and taking time to enjoy the freedom of flight. Before long, the Gardien rose above the limb of the planet. He’d be home within a half hour, pining for his next chance to fly free.
“That you, Ari?” If his solitude had to be interrupted by a human voice, he could do worse than Maura’s.
“Who else would it be?”
He knew damn well who she was afraid it might be. He tilted his head upward toward the spear of light that dominated the sky. A new ship from Earth arriving unannounced after all these years was reason enough to be on edge.
“I’ll have your approach vector in a moment.” Maura’s image in his faceplate wore the drive flare like a burning gash on her forehead. “Your drop was perfect. The microprobe will skim the atmosphere deep enough to pick up some dust samples, but high enough to avoid surface contamination. With any luck, some of those dust grains will carry living spores.”
“We wouldn’t need luck if they’d let us dive lower. Damn Earthborn are too cautious.”
“You managed to get a pretty deep dive on that last orbit.” She pursed her lips in mock disapproval. “You’re going to catch hell for your little maneuver.”
“What? I was just dropping low for a perigee kick.”
Her laugh was pure music. “Good luck getting the director to buy that one. She’s in a foul mood.”
He snorted, momentarily fogging his faceplate. “She doesn’t need my help. Dear old Mom takes foul to a new level, even for an Earthborn.”
“Don’t be cruel. They earned the right to be grumpy.”
“Maybe they’d be more caring if they hadn’t cranked us out of their wombs like an assembly line.”
“Have some respect. You don’t know how long they’ll be around.”
“We’ll be restocking our supply of Earthborn soon, from the looks of it.” He gestured toward the light as he spoke, even though his helmet’s cam couldn’t show it. “It warms my heart to know that even the Secretary-General has no idea why Earth sent a second ship after all these years.”
She huffed. “You have no respect for authority, Ari.”
“It’s all part of my charm.” He flashed a grin that he hoped was rakish before realizing that it was wasted out here where she couldn’t see it.
A partly suppressed smile bloomed on her face. “What would be charming is treating me to one of those new beefmeat burgers imported from the moon base. I hear they taste just like natural meat back on Earth.”
“And who would know? The Earthborn are so old even their taste buds are dying.”
Her head shook back and forth in his faceplate. “You shouldn’t be talking like that on an open channel.”
“All right, I’ll be good.” He grinned. “Now are you going to give me an approach vector or am I going to do another orbit?”
“Uh . . . hold on a sec. Ari? I have the director on the line.”
“What? Did she hear—”
“Shhh. I’m getting instructions now.”
“She probably just wants to bust my ass about dropping too deep into the atmosphere. Heaven forbid we risk contaminating their precious pristine planet with my ashes.”
“Okay, she’s sending a new orbit for you.”
“What the hell? She wants me to take another lap? Is something wrong with the microprobe?”
“No, the probe’s fine. I don’t like this, Ari. She wants me to sign off. She’s taking over—”
Maura’s image dissolved into the black of the sky. He turned his focus back to the Gardien, wondering what was going on there. The bright point of light, now high above the horizon line, offered no answers. After an endle
ss pause, the incoming message indicator lit.
The director’s gaunt face floated before him. She looked desiccated, like a corpse left outside to vacuum-dry. A specter from a distant world, Ari thought. This new world is ours to explore, not theirs. Explore, but never touch.
Her sunken eyes pinned Ari in place. “Skimmer pilot, report your status.” The voice was scratchy and hoarse, weary from two hundred years of life, yet still it carried the aura of authority.
He eyeballed the dropdown at the top left of his faceplate and brought up the system check display. The bioscrubbers were pumping out oxygen faster than he could breathe it; the oh-two tanks were full. The magsail loops were well below the critical temperature where they would stop superconducting. “Nominal, ma’am.” After a moment’s pause he added, “Except the radio. I lost contact with shipboard control.” But that’s not a malfunction.
“I know.” She nodded slowly, carefully, as though afraid her neck might snap. “For security, I will be your only contact with the Gardien during this mission.”
That put a lump in his throat. “And what mission is that?”
She gazed at him, unmoving, for a long moment. “A small vessel has entered orbit of the planet.”
“Not one of ours, I assume.” He glanced once again at the enigmatic flare from Earth. “They’re pretty far out and still under heavy deceleration. I’d have expected them to wait until they made orbit.”
“Clearly Earth’s propulsion technology has improved since we left.”
“So the Earth people put a, what, probe or something into orbit? What am I going to be able to do about it?”
“A shuttle. For now, just observe. You’re the only manned asset I have on orbit at the moment.”
Asset? That’s all I am to her? Before he could say anything, his HUD indicator signaled an incoming data packet. New orbital parameters. He eyeballed the dropdown at the top left of his faceplate and brought up a visual overlay. The orbit was eccentric, with a perigee lower than he had ever gone. His heart skipped at the thought. Permission to skim the upper atmosphere? Hell, yeah!
Excitement bubbling in his veins, he hardly noticed when the director disconnected. The forbidden dream—to touch a living world—was about to come one step closer. But to touch was to contaminate, he knew, to introduce his alien proteins and nucleic acids into an ecosystem that might not be able to handle them. We’d never know what was native and what was from Earth. We’d lose irreplaceable data. All true, but so damned frustrating.
His altitude grew gradually toward apogee, giving Ari plenty of time to stare at the living world below. His eyes traced the arc of a coastline, vivid blue overlaid on shades of tan and green, until he lost it in swirled white clouds. He tried to imagine what it would be like to stand on that beach, to feel the moist wind in his face. What sounds would there be? What did it smell like?
“Um, Ari?” Maura’s voice, tight with stress, startled him. “I’m defying orders by contacting you, so I’ll have to make this quick.”
He glanced up at the curved horizon line. The Gardien was a bright light shimmering through the upper edge of atmosphere. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re planning to land.”
“Who? The people from Earth? Nonsense. They sent us to preserve the ecosystem. They wouldn’t risk contaminating it.”
Atmospheric distortion crackled in his ear. Their ancestors sent our mothers; we were frozen embryos when that decision was made. Attitudes back on Earth may have changed.
How dare they risk destroying a lifetime of study? How dare they touch the world, experience it up close, achieve his dream?
And what the hell was Ari supposed to do about it?
Somehow, solitude had lost its charm. He busied himself by fiddling with the radio. Maybe the director hadn’t shut down his emergency channel. His heart thumped in his chest when he found the radio wouldn’t respond to his command. His oxygen-use indicator briefly flashed yellow—he was using oxygen faster than the bioscrubber was producing it.
He forced his breathing into a practiced rhythm, slow and steady. No sense depleting the oh-two tanks unnecessarily. He eyeballed the radio diagnostic software. Red error messages scrolled up his faceplate. The radio was fried.
Wait. The content of the error messages belatedly registered. The radio was fine; it was the software that was fried. And how exactly did that happen?
The director’s data packet must’ve contained more than orbital data. She really doesn’t want me contacting anyone. What else did she sabotage?
Hell with her. He looked up along the skimmer’s carbon fiber frame. The magsail’s superconducting loops doubled as his radio antenna. The kilometer-long nanofiber filaments that made the loops were invisibly thin, and even if he could see them he wouldn’t have been able to manipulate them by hand. Not without risking a coil collapse. Without those superconducting coils pushing against Nouvelle Terre’s magnetosphere, he would have no way to maneuver.
That left the backup transceiver, a small dish mounted on the bottom of the skimmer’s frame. The software for that was scrambled too, but it should be easy enough to write a few lines of code to keep it aimed at the nearest geosynchronous relay satellite. If he remembered its longitude correctly.
He activated the faceplate keyboard. Writing code by eyeball was frustratingly slow. His temples throbbed with stress by the time he was ready to test it.
“. . . unidentified craft . . .”
Was that a voice in the static? He tweaked the longitude value by a fraction of a degree. “Shuttle Feynman to unidentified craft. Can you respond?”
Ari’s heart tried to claw its way out of his chest. I’m a skimmer jockey, not a diplomat. He blew out a few deep breaths and eyeballed the transmit icon. “Are you really from Earth?” His voice wavered, rising in pitch as he spoke. Stupid first words.
“That we are. We’ve come to join the colony. Only we can’t seem to find any of your settlements.”
“Settlements? On the surface, you mean? We study the surface remotely, from orbit.”
“You’re kidding.”
Ari hesitated, his mouth open, unsure what to say. He wished he could talk to Maura.
“You got a name, son?”
“My name’s Ari.”
“Well, Ari, you might want to give your orbit a nudge. You’re going to pass dangerously close to us.”
He pulled down the graphics overlay on his HUD. The skimmer’s nanoprocessor had located the Earth shuttle and showed its projected orbit as a bright green curve. Sure enough, his orbit intersected it near perigee.
“Sorry about that, Earth ship.”
“Aw, hell. Call me Bill.”
Ari eyeballed the nav dropdown, nudged the magsail’s current.
OVERRIDE.
What the hell? He tried again, with the same result.
“Um, Bill? I’m having a bit of a problem here. You’ll have to clear a path for me.”
“Understood.” There was a long pause while Bill attended to whatever details he had to take care of. “I’ll fire a quick burn, push myself above and behind you. There’s gonna be hell to pay, though. It’ll delay my landing by at least two orbits.”
“You can’t land.”
“And why would that be, son?”
“That’s a unique ecology down there, something new and alien.” He repeated the words almost verbatim from the schoolvids. “It needs to be preserved. Introducing Earth life before we understand it could be disastrous.”
“You came all this way just to hang in orbit and watch?”
“Observe, study, report. Our mothers have been sending yearly data bursts back to Earth since they got here.”
“Records from before the war are sketchy. The receiver stations must’ve been lost.”
War? A queasy feeling rose in his stomach. After a long moment, he managed to say, “The Earthborn taught us that Earth was unified.”
“What? Oh, you mean the UN? Broke up years ago when the Chines
e seceded.”
“You didn’t get any of our data bursts?”
“All we knew is that there was a colony at Alpha Centauri. We came prepared to conquer the wilderness, not for life in orbit. Hell, our anti-rad meds are almost gone.”
“Meds? Why not use gene therapy? My adrenal cortex produces all the androstenediol I need to keep me safe from radiation.”
“You’re genetically engineered?”
“No, we use gene therapy. We’re hoping to engineer the genes directly into the next generation. Save them the booster shots.”
There was a long pause. “We have laws against that.”
“Earth has laws. They’re four light years away.”
“Humph. Maybe. Attitudes are harder to change than laws. There’s a lot of people who would die before they pollute their bodies with foreign genes.”
Ari shook his head behind his faceplate, even though he had an audio-only connection. “I guess I just don’t understand Earth people.”
“Goes both ways, son. I couldn’t imagine living my whole life in a tin can.”
Not a tin can, but surely cramped quarters compared to an entire planet. How can we even begin to relate to them? Unsure what to say, he let the silence drag on. His eyes drifted back to the HUD. The shuttle’s projected orbit shifted slowly, sluggishly. Yet the orbits still intersected. His skimmer was adjusting the magsail current automatically, maintaining a collision course. He manually cranked the pitch loop’s current.
OVERRIDE.
Panic rising up in his throat, he desperately scanned the horizon line for the Earth shuttle. Not a chance—even if it were naked-eye visible, it would still be below the horizon.
Incoming message. He nearly jumped out of his skinsuit when the light came on. He eyeballed the receive icon.
The director’s skeletal image appeared on his faceplate, her eyes stern, her jaw set. “Break off communication with the Earth shuttle at once.”