by Glenn Damato
I get Eric back on the com. Big surprise, he’s irritated. At me.
“I know you have two units down,” he grumbles. “So do we, and so does Resolute. Everybody’s got at least one unit down. I think we’ll see intermittent shutdowns for the next five weeks. These units were chosen for their low weight. They do crap out, which is why we all got three. We only need sixty percent of the output of one unit to meet the requirements of six people. Even with two down, your flow is at eighty-four percent.”
Shuko says, “It was ninety yesterday.”
Eric responds, “Regardless, all five spacecraft are at full oxygen capacity, despite the fact I didn’t tweak the roll schedules today. That’s why the temps went out of spec.”
My brain is exhausted. “We need to watch these things.”
“Well, yeah, Cristina, sure. I don’t want you to worry, but there’s nothing much we can do but try to manage the temps. The Genesis team screwed up the heat balance.”
“How much warning before they go out completely? Maybe there’s a way to transfer oxygen between spacecraft.”
“Won’t need to.” He yawns long and wide. “Not losing sleep over it. They don’t have to last forever, just the duration of the flight.”
TWENTY-FIVE
I push off and float, muscles tensed, waiting for the ball to fly.
Shuko barks, “Go!”
Ryder serves—too hard. No real control. After a few random bounces it’s easy to block the ball away from the hatch and keep him from scoring until the clock runs out. His strong, compact physique may have been perfect for rugby, but not for spaceball. Spaceball requires agility and accuracy in equal amounts. Brute force is useless.
I block with my left thigh, taking just enough speed off the ball to enable Ryder to smack it again. Two bounces, then he flips backwards to try for another whack. His hand swats air.
The buzzer goes off. Shuko calls from inside the equipment bay, “Switch!”
I wipe my forehead with my sleeve. “I forfeit. Don’t want you to smack your elbow like yesterday.”
We touch hands. “Another game after dinner?”
I shake my head. “Systems training. For everybody.”
“Oh, mom!”
After the first week, Liberty became a prison. The sameness of each day—of each hour—squashes all desire to do anything besides eat and sleep. A handful of us make slow progress through the training systems, most of them motivated by the hope of being chosen for a Discovery Team.
Spaceball changed all that. Spaceball is a reason not to sleep. Spaceball is life.
It was Shuko’s idea. Regular exercise, plus a bit of healthy competition, to get everyone’s juices flowing and promote physiological wellness. Whatever that means, it works. Once we get the table folded away the open space of the control center is roughly the size of my puny old bedroom. Being able to float around makes it seem larger—big enough for serious action, anyhow.
Endurance printed their ball as a little globe of Mars.
We play hundreds of games for two solid weeks. No serious injuries, except when Jewel de la Bora aboard Constitution broke her finger in an exceptionally savage game against Indra. Dee Thompson on Resolute keeps a ranking posted on the net. Ryder holds second place after Walt Sullivan. No one can finish a thirty-minute game against Ryder. He never quits twisting and tumbling. The pure energy wears us down.
Spaceball isn’t his only physical activity. The rhythmic thumping from Ryder’s sleeper is pretty obvious. Tonight’s Alison’s turn. Didn’t three games of spaceball tire them out at least a little?
Shuko stares at the main panel and shakes his head as if amazed. I push across the control center and peer over his shoulder.
“Is it the O2 generator flow?”
“The flow’s been decreasing but we’re still at full capacity.” He giggles and taps the panel. The curved lines are cabin partial pressures, not O2 generator flow.
“You see a problem?”
“No, just something interesting.” He smirks, not his most appealing facial expression.
The thumps increase tempo.
“When they’re in there, our oxygen partial pressure drops by two tenths of a kilopascal. Look. It was at nominal twenty-four point five a few minutes ago. Now it’s point three.” Another giggle.
How stupid is this? “Who cares? Watch the O2 generators instead, okay?”
He waves the partial pressure history into view. “When he’s going with the other two, the oxygen drops by only one tenth. Look, you can see the abrupt dip every time, and in the morning, too.”
“I really, really don’t give a shit. So shut it.”
Why is he showing me this now? Is this amazing biological discovery supposed to somehow stir my desire? Did he imagine the only woman on Liberty Ryder has not slept with would be inspired to snuggle-buggle with him?
He presses his left leg against my right, then mumbles something about how chilly it is and how two can keep each other warm. I push away and twist toward my sleeper. No, he might get the wrong idea and follow. I duck into the hygiene pit instead.
Midnight’s the best time for a complete and unhurried wash. Yesterday’s leftover sponge is still reasonably usable. By the time I pop the hygiene pit hatch and emerge, Shuko’s curled up like a newborn infant between the CO2 scrubber and the power panel. He claims he loves sleeping in there because the white noise calms his nerves like an embryo listening to its mother’s blood flow.
The thumps are gone but there’s some kind of other strange sound. Yes, singing, growing louder and punctuated by frequent laughs.
On this day I am free!
I can't wait what my eyes will see
I dream about it wherever I may be
It's a day that belongs to me
On this day I am free!
I cross my arms and snort. Wasting time and energy when we should all be focused on becoming experts in operating the equipment on which lives depend. This isn’t a game or an academy, where mistakes only hurt your grade.
Ryder slides his door open. He’s wearing nothing but a skin-tight white undergarment. He smiles before gracefully flipping into the hygiene pit.
I yell at him before he can disappear, “We have twenty-two days left, and we’ve done shit for training.”
“Whose fault is that, flight director?” He shuts the hatch.
◆◆◆
Constitution’s three oxygen generators fail at the same time.
Eric tells us, “I tried running unit one at seventy percent with two offline. My theory was the ambient heat from the other units caused the high electrolyte temps. Didn’t work, and now units two and three are pretty much frozen solid.”
I can’t make sense of the long list of yellow and red messages. “You’re down to one unit?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m confident units two and three will be back on line tomorrow. We all got forty-eight hours of compressed oxygen reserve anyhow. This is no big deal.”
“But we’re barely halfway to Mars.”
“Notice we’re still breathing.”
“There has to be a fallback, an alternative way to generate oxygen.”
He sighs. “Triple redundant units are the fallback. I’m rolling five spacecraft to balance the heat and keep the hydrogen discharge lines from getting clogged with slurry. What else do you want from me?”
“Is there any way to transfer oxygen between spacecraft?”
“With a hose? You’re jumping to unfounded conclusions and worrying about what we’ll never need to do. In the future, why don’t you take this up with Jürgen?”
Jürgen? He’s captain because he can make dramatic speeches.
Jürgen is in charge, that much is always understood. Jürgen is the only person not listed on the spaceball ranking. He never plays, and no one bothers to ask why. The answer is obvious: our captain is working on bigger things. Jürgen is above spaceball.
Jürgen makes it easy to listen. His words are an addictiv
e drug. His daily dinner presentations pull everyone in and drive them to think about the future—a greater future than the dull routine of eating, sleeping, defecating into a tube, and looking at the same faces and the same panels every day.
As usual, there’s a rush to get everyone’s food printed before Jürgen starts speaking. I nudge my steaming box of chicken and rice to the table and fit in between Alison and Paige. The chicken bits are one of the few kinds of printed food that are inferior to the real thing, but they’re still tasty.
Eric has taken Jürgen’s place on the main panel. He shows his unfocused stare, meaning serious business. Mikki tosses Ryder and Shuko their dinner boxes and their chatting masks Eric’s words.
I shout toward the com, “Can you repeat that?”
“He said Hellas Planitia,” Ryder answers. “What’s a Planitia?”
Eric casts his eyes downward. “It means plain. Smooth landscape, with water ice. The twelve of us reached this decision only after informed debate.” He closes his eyes and lets out a long breath. “We believe it will be significantly safer to land on the flat terrain of the northwest edge of the Hellas Planitia than the hilly landscape at Protonilus.”
Ryder and Mikki exchange glances.
I swallow chicken. “Hold it. You want to change the landing site?”
“I think we should. Hellas is certain to harbor shallow ice deposits and mineral resources just like Protonilus. Hellas has a lower elevation than Protonilus, so the atmosphere averages seventy percent denser. That means better radiation protection when we’re on the surface plus more efficient CO2 and nitrogen extraction.”
I ask him, “Then why did the Genesis engineers choose Protonilus?”
“Seasonal timing. Spring starts in the northern hemisphere in three weeks. Hellas is in the southern hemisphere, which is heading into autumn. They wanted to maximize the hours of sunshine so we can grow more food. But don’t think spring and summer at Protonilus mean warmth and butterflies. Summer at Protonilus is like summer in Antarctica. Daytime temps run up to maybe ten degrees, but at night it drops back to minus sixty. We’ll still need the reactors to keep from freezing.”
Eric’s vid is replaced by a south Asian woman. Under other circumstances she’d be pretty—but today her mouth has a grim and irregular twist. “This is Senuri Kumar, flight director on Endurance. I want to make clear the reasons we chose this new path. From an engineering perspective, once the landing has been accomplished, Hellas is as survivable as Protonilus. But the landing is the most hazardous phase. Each spacecraft weighs almost one hundred tons. No mass remotely as heavy has ever landed on Mars. The largest so far were the two Russian ExoMars probes, both three tons. That was over forty years ago.”
Eric takes over. He tells us he thinks it would be prudent to err in the direction of caution. Flat terrain increases the probability of successful landings. Far fewer hazards. This is why early aerospace organizations like NASA chose flat sites for their first Viking landers. The summer sunshine hours won’t do any good if we don’t survive the landing. In fact, two separate landing sites gives us a better overall chance. With everyone at the same site, a single unknown hazard could kill us all.
Paige folds her arms. “What does Jürgen say?”
According to the Articles, the captain has the authority to make these big decisions. But Eric doesn’t mention Jürgen.
I clear my throat. “This affects all of us. We’re supposed to come down five hundred meters apart and back each other up. Now you want three spacecraft at Protonilus, the other two on the other side of the planet?”
Alison asks, “Are you sure flatter is safer for landing? Maybe we should all switch to Hellas.”
I remind her, “David expected us to land in hilly terrain, where the resources are. Flatter terrain, less variety of resources.”
Eric wipes his hand across his face. “Flatter is safer. The GNC will do a correction burn on or about forty-five Taurus, seven days from now. As a test, I simulated a trajectory to Hellas and it would require very little extra propellant, provided we edit the programmed landing points before the next correction. If we wait, we’ll be committed to Protonilus.”
Paige, Shuko, and Alison turn to me. As if, what do we do? Mikki and Ryder shove their dinner into their mouths faster than usual.
I ask Eric, “Are we certain we can grow food during the winter months?”
“It would be beneficial to have a higher sun angle and more hours of daylight. The big unknown factor is how long it will take to fabricate and erect greenhouse enclosures. We’ll need tons of polycarbonates derived from native resources. The Genesis planners figured sixty to ninety days after landing, but Senuri and I agree that could be wildly optimistic. If there are delays getting the enclosures pressurized, if it takes a couple of hundred days or longer, we’ll be more than half-way through our food reserves and heading into the northern hemisphere winter. We may end up entirely dependent on winter crops when our stored food runs out.”
Mikki snickers. “That’s when we roast your ass on a spit.”
“Whatever we do,” I tell them, “We do it together. Hellas or Protonilus, all five spacecraft must have the same destination. Face it, we don’t know how many out of five will make a successful landing. We’re going to need all the backup we can get. We have a few days to decide. I propose we consider the question further and make an informed vote. I’m willing to change our trajectory if that’s what the majority decides is the best option.”
“Doesn’t anyone remember the Charter?” asks Paige. “This is up to the captain.”
“That’s right,” snaps Tess on the vid feed from Independence. Her eyes are still puffy from the last traces of the super-flu. “Captain Morita will speak now. Hold questions until he’s done.”
He’s Captain Morita now.
El Capitán wears his customary sly smile. In some crazy way he knows everything will turn out fine. “We’re here for a common purpose,” he begins, eyes tranquil and confident at the same time. “We rejected our comfortable existence in exchange for the ability to control our own destiny. My colleagues Eric and Senuri are driven by that same pursuit of liberty.”
Jürgen’s vid dissolves to a pic of a smiling Senuri posed with a group standing in a field of deep green vegetation.
“Six months ago, at age nineteen, Senuri was the youngest person to ever serve as general manager of a farming cooperative in the Republic of India.”
Another pic: Eric without his beard, speaking if front of a group of technicians.
“At age eighteen, Eric was promoted to senior project manager at Nihon Unisys. Neither Senuri nor Eric are likely to make hurried decisions. It probably is safer to land at Hellas. But if it were safety you craved, you would have stayed on Earth. Our purpose is not to be safe. Our purpose is to build a free civilization, and to accomplish that end we need to work together as a cohesive society. This strategy of mutual help and reinforcement is as old as humanity itself, and it is a strategy with a record of success, especially when venturing forth into a new frontier.”
I almost clap my hands. It had to happen eventually; El Capitán is completely correct.
Jürgen displays a diagram of Mars’s orbit around the sun—a slightly-flattened elliptical circle with one side noticeably closer to the sun than the other.
“Landing alive is our first goal. I’m also concerned with our second and third goals, as well as our fourth, fifth, tenth, and hundredth. There are a thousand necessary steps that need to come together before we can have a thriving, stable community.”
A green arrow appears on the diagram. “Here’s Mars today, a few weeks before the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. Notice how Mars is moving into the part of its orbit that brings it further from the sun. As Mars moves further from the sun, it’s orbital velocity decreases. Mars reaches aphelion here, during the northern hemisphere summer. This means summer in the northern hemisphere lasts a long time. We’ll have about four hundred days o
f relatively warm daytime temps, with fourteen hours of sunshine per day.”
Jürgen’s face returns, this time the somber Jürgen. “In the southern hemisphere the opposite effect occurs. Winters are long, summers short. Hellas is heading into four hundred days of little sunshine. A couple of hundred days from now, when we’ll be ready to grow food, Hellas will be in the middle of winter with only nine hours of low-angle sunlight per day. Will we be able to keep the plants from freezing during a fourteen-hour night at minus one hundred degrees? If we can’t, we starve. At Protonilus, we’ll have two harvests stored away before the first winter hits. It will be a shorter winter, less than three hundred days.”
No argument comes from Eric, Senuri, or anyone else. A genuine magical wizard, Jürgen could change minds without arguing or threatening. Whatever he decides becomes contagious.
This time it’s a wonderful thing.
TWENTY-SIX
The sharpest consequences of tight confinement require a full month to bloom. After a crappy day, there’s no place to take a walk, no place to get away. Some days are so horrendous the riiiiiip sound of Velcro on the bottom of Paige’s socks is enough to arouse blood-pounding rage.
My dreams are in vivid colors. They start instantly when I fall asleep: eagles flying across a brilliant blue sky, enormous pink-granite mountains, misty redwood forests rich with the aromas of life. Yes, dreams with smells. Sensory deprivation, maybe? The wonders of spaceflight.
We have no real Stream, but all is not lost. David promised a vast store of vids and books, and he wasn’t lying. There are millions, far more than one person could watch in a lifetime. Many are from the 1970s, 1980s, all through the 2020s—violent and confusing, but entertaining in a weird way. Are these vids accurate about life in the old America states? Contrary to what we learned at Academy, the people in those times weren’t starving or under constant threat of murder. They were mostly happy, and they knew once they were inside their residences nothing could watch them.
Since the equipment bay is his bedroom, Shuko usually does the daily maintenance on the CO2 scrubbers and HEPA filters. I think I understand why he likes it in there: the ventilation is stronger than in the sleepers and some spots are like an outdoor breeze against your skin.