Mars Nation 1

by Brandon Q Morris

  Cable number five tore free. Theo now needed to be extra careful. Once he cut the last cable, the module would enter free fall. Hopefully, he could find a safe spot to withstand the impact. He wouldn’t have time to reach the airlock since it was located on the side of the module, and the airflow there would be terrible.

  “One hundred fifty kilometers,” Sharon remarked calmly. That didn’t matter. The most important thing was simply for them to make a soft landing.

  The camera image jolted. That, for sure, was the last cable. Lance watched the screen as the module immediately accelerated. The camera now showed only gray metal. Theo was probably situated on the top of the module and holding on as tightly as he could. He only had to make it through several seconds. Lance watched the elevation trajectory. The engines should fire again as soon as they reached one hundred fifty meters above the surface. And—Yes!—they did! Sharon applauded. The landing unit slowed down. The surface looked good, no large boulders in sight. Fifty meters, twenty, ten, finally the module was on the ground. Lance heard noisy jubilation and clapping from the lower deck.

  Ewa called in. She looked pale. Her task wasn’t over yet. Sharon and Lance congratulated her. “Thank you for tracking us. Unfortunately, we still need your assistance. On our own, we won’t make it to the base.”

  “We were already thinking about that,” Lance said, “but we’ll manage it. You needed to speak with Mike and Sarah. We still need to land ourselves.”

  “Just a minute,” Ewa said. “Our crew was wondering if you could be part of the solution. If the Endeavour could land at a distance we could cover by foot, we could hike over to you and then handle things from there.”

  This initially sounded doable, but then completely impossible, because this would make their next launch significantly more difficult. The machine’s fuel production only took place at its intended landing site close to the base. How could they transport liquid oxygen and hydrogen across a hundred kilometers of the Mars surface?

  “We’ll need to discuss that,” Lance said. “But the most important thing right now is that you’ve landed.”

  Sol 7, MfE landing module

  Ewa could feel her aching muscles as soon as she awoke. Working out on an ergometer was completely different from having to deal with a planet’s gravitational pull around the clock. It had only been ten hours since they had landed, although it already seemed like an eternity. Since the chain of dramatic incidents had ended, time had returned to its normal, non-turbo pace.

  Once they landed, they had all been too exhausted to even set foot on the Mars surface. Theo had climbed through the airlock into the module and had been welcomed as a hero. But then they had all succumbed to sleep. That was alright, though. Ewa didn’t view this as a loss of time, rather a necessity. As long as they didn’t leave the landing module, they weren’t under any time pressure, since the life support system was sufficiently large and stocked with an ample amount of oxygen.

  They would have to cross 150 kilometers before reaching the NASA base. This problem wouldn’t be easy to solve, but Ewa had decided to postpone it for the time being. Before they tackled this, they would have to do what a scientist would do—feel the new planet under their own feet. She was confident the others would agree with her.

  “Well, how about going out for a little walk?” she asked the group.

  The faces of her fellow travelers looked weary, but her suggestion was met with all-around agreement.

  “Absolutely,” Ellen exclaimed. “I wanted to go out yesterday, but you all looked so exhausted.”

  “You could’ve convinced me to go,” Andy said.

  “Who wants to go first?” Ewa asked.

  “I think Theo should be the first one to set foot on Mars. We wouldn’t even be here without him!”

  “Theo?”

  The German opened his eyes. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m so sore that even my bones hurt. Feel free to set off on your own. I need a break.”

  “We’ll draw lots,” Ewa suggested.

  Ellen nodded.

  There were seven of them. Theo didn’t want to go, and as commander, Ewa decided, she would go last. She needed five somethings, four of which would be blanks. She looked around the module. It would be impossible to find paper in all this chaos. Ewa reached into her pocket. The tissue would have to suffice. She ripped it into five pieces and marked one of them with a pencil she found in the toolbox, before balling them up.

  Gabriella drew the piece with the x on it. She would be the first volunteer from the Mars for Everyone Initiative to step onto their new home planet. The doctor smiled.

  “Congratulations!” Ewa said, adding to the others’ enthusiastic comments as they pulled on their spacesuits. Only Theo remained quiet, sitting in a corner.

  They helped each other get dressed. Ewa and Ellen lifted Gabriella’s HUT into place. The upper part of the spacesuit was bulky and heavy, especially in Mars’s gravity field. Ewa finally realized that with their landing, she had lost something that she could never regain. She would never again float over to Theo. Gravity would accompany her and her children’s children for the rest of their lives. A year ago, this would have seemed completely normal, because she didn’t know anything else. But over the past six months, she had gotten used to weightlessness.

  Ewa turned around. The animals were locked in a corner in a wire cage. What did they think about their new surroundings? Had they inherited the instinct to cope with gravity, or would they have to learn what to do? The mammals might still carry inside them a memory of Earth, but the current generation of mealworm beetles had been born in space. She would need to watch them carefully to see how this influenced their reproduction rate. However, she was basically optimistic. The more adverse the circumstances, the faster Mother Nature tended to speed up the life cycle process.

  Gabriella entered the airlock. They no longer needed to go through the pre-breathing procedure since the normal atmosphere in the module had been replaced with pure oxygen, which had meant they could lower the pressure inside. This significantly reduced the risk of getting the bends, which occurred due to the presence of nitrogen in the air being breathed.

  “It feels great,” she said from outside.

  The crew applauded. Andy was the next in line, while Ewa brought up the end of the line.

  Ten minutes later, Ewa was also standing on Mars. She scraped her foot across the ground, which was solid, covered with only a little dust. It looked like California’s Death Valley. Ewa knelt down and cleared a patch of ground. The reddish dust stuck to her glove. The surface looked as if it hadn’t rained in a long time. It was riddled with cracks and ruts. And yet, it didn’t look arid. The dirt reminded her of the contents of her flower pots when she forgot to water them for two weeks. Ewa crumbled a little dirt from the edge of a rut. It was crumbly but not uniform. It contained various components. When they added moisture and some organic materials, bacteria and other small creatures were bound to thrive—and eventually generate the fertile soil needed to grow crops.

  But that was still a long way off. They had the seeds on board, of course, but they weren’t yet in a position to cultivate the plants that would grow from them. But the mission was far from being jeopardized by this reality. Ewa would have to keep going and fulfill her responsibilities, regardless of how many victims fell along the way. Only the goal mattered. She extended her legs in front, lay back, and stretched out on the ground. Her eyes wandered up to the sky, which looked strangely unstructured. There were no clouds here like there were on Earth. Neither Mars’s hard, waterless ground nor its thin air which lacked oxygen bothered her at the moment. All she wanted to see for the rest of her days was the hazy, blurry, brownish pink of the sky. It was an alien sky, and yet she would now live under it forever.

  “It will take about ten hours for our Rover to reach you,” Mike said.

  “We’ll make it that long,” Ewa replied.

  “There is one problem, though. The Rover is running a
low-pressure system without an airlock. This means you have to wear your spacesuit to get on and off of it, and all the air in the cabin will be vented out.”

  “That does present a problem,” Ewa said, scratching her head. “We have all sorts of animals with us, and they don’t have any spacesuits.”

  “Besides that, the Rover has a retractable pressurized tube. We use that to move from the base or the ship to the cabin of the Rover without spacesuits.”

  “You are explaining this like it isn’t an option for us.”

  “Right. You lack the corresponding piece. The tube has to be attached to the outer hatch of an airlock so that it can stay airtight. You would need a coupling mechanism like that.”

  “Could we recreate it somehow if you sent us the specs?”

  “I think that would fall somewhere between complicated and impossible. Or do you have a lathe on board that could cut a perfectly-fitting, one-meter metal ring?”

  Ellen tapped her on the shoulder. Ewa nodded.

  “My father always said that you could make anything work with duct tape. We have plenty of that. Couldn’t we just secure the tube with that?” Ellen asked into the microphone.

  “We just sealed a small leak with some duct tape yesterday,” Mike said. “It was Sarah’s idea. But would it be enough for a tube? You can try to figure that out. The challenge will be the module’s curved external wall. The end of the tube is flat. On the top and bottom, the duct tape would need to have a thickness of at least thirty centimeters. Would the material hold in these cold temperatures?”

  “Ellen will test it out,” Ewa said. “Any other ideas? How large is the inside of the Rover?”

  “Quite a bit smaller than the module, but we could take you in two trips.”

  “Pack up, people! They’re coming to get us!” Ewa said. She felt like a teacher preparing her students for a field trip.

  Everyone dutifully packed up their things.

  “We can’t take everything with us the first time,” Ewa explained. “We will wait to take the non-essential items with us on our second round. If what you’re leaving here has special handling instructions, you will need to jot them down and tape them to the object.”

  “Where do we get the paper and tape?” Andy asked.

  “Use whatever you can find. Or take the fragile things with you on the first trip.”

  “Who’ll come back on the Rover’s return trip?”

  “We’ll decide that later, Andy. But I need someone to volunteer to stay behind and watch the animals. They will be brought on the second trip.”

  “Do you already know how we’re going to get them to the Rover without spacesuits?” Andy asked.

  “We have ideas, but no solution yet. But I’m optimistic.”

  “I’ll stay,” Rebecca volunteered.

  Again, Ewa was taken by surprise. The black South African woman hadn’t attracted her attention in terms of personal initiative. However, the reality was that in a smaller group, individuals often found themselves more likely to be challenged and engaged.

  “Bad news,” Ellen exclaimed over the radio. “I’ve been playing out here a little with the duct tape, but it looks hopeless. It would be easier to nail pudding to the wall.

  “Thanks for trying,” Ewa replied.

  “We can’t leave the animals here!” Ellen declared.

  “Nor will we.”

  “Good. Then I’ll come back inside.”

  Andy shook his head and pointed to her helmet. Why didn’t he just tell her what was bothering him?

  “Do I really need to?” she asked.

  Andy nodded, pulling on his own helmet. She did the same. A beep signaled that Andy was trying to contact her via a private channel. She accepted the request.

  A text appeared on her helmet screen: “Please turn toward the wall so nobody can read your lips, and speak quietly.”

  He was really overdoing this. Andy was acting like he was investigating a conspiracy. Had the events prior to their landing perhaps rattled him? Ewa turned around so he would leave her in peace after this. Andy could be stubborn when he wanted to make something happen.

  “Thanks,” she heard him say. “What I’m going to tell you has to remain between the two of us.”

  “I promise,” she replied, though she couldn’t keep an annoyed undertone out of her voice.

  “I get it that this isn’t something that interests you right now,” Andy said. “We really have better things to do than chat on a private channel like two conspirators.”

  True, Andy, you’re right, she thought. What had he discovered? It really would be better for Andy if he didn’t always have to obsess about things and could simply just let things go.

  “Do you remember the moment we wanted to uncouple the module?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “It didn’t function.”

  “Yeah, that was why there was all that drama afterward.”

  Now he was hand-feeding her facts that she knew anyway. She was about to end their conversation.

  “What would you say if I told you that wasn’t what happened?” he asked.

  “You mean we just happened to all have a collective hallucination? If you’re about to tell me that, as your commander, I’ll have to send you to the doctor. I hope—”

  “Unfortunately, that’s what I have to tell you. The module should’ve been released without a hitch. It just thought it couldn’t do it.”

  “Andy, I’ve had it up to here with all this. The module can’t think for itself!”

  “I didn’t phrase that well. The software reported an error, even though there wasn’t one.”

  “But... why would it do that?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know the motive behind it. I can only assure you that the software was manipulated in such a way that it registered a non-existent error.”

  Ewa’s heart rate quickened. “Andy, but remember what Theo told us,” she said. “He saw the jammed bolt with his own eyes.”

  “I’m not sure what he actually saw. Maybe he lied to us?”

  “Theo saved us. Why would he have lied to us about what was wrong?”

  “I haven’t figured out potential motives behind all this. Theo might’ve seen what he wanted to see. When you briefed him, you told him that a bolt had to be jammed. But it definitely wasn’t. We would’ve been able to uncouple the latch just like normal if the software hadn’t been manipulated.

  “And why are you so sure about that?”

  “You brought me the memory boards from the other module. I was able to carefully compare our software to those boards by searching for clues to whatever had been manipulated in terms of the engine control. Hackers occasionally leave behind almost imperceptible signatures because they are proud of their work. Ideally speaking, no one is ever meant to notice them.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “No, but that only means that it wasn’t freelancers who did the work on the engine.”

  “But instead?”

  “Full-time paid programmers who didn’t care about what they were doing. Or professionals maybe, who didn’t want to risk the chance of someone catching onto them.”

  “But how would these people have known that we would want to undock the module? Our plans didn’t include that step.”

  “That’s also been bothering me, too, Ewa. At first, I was thinking that someone must have kept them informed about what was happening, and they had made the necessary adjustments.”

  “But you don’t think that anymore?”

  “No, I don’t... I think the hacker was on board.”

  “You mean, you’re sure one of us did it?” Ewa was appalled by Andy’s words. His accusations were outrageous. This had to be kept from the others, and especially from the NASA team. They would never allow such a security risk inside their base!

  “Yeah, relatively sure,” Andy replied. “Our opportunities to communicate with Earth are limited. For the critical time span, I couldn
’t find a single message in the ship’s memory that had been sent from there. That means that someone on board has to be operating solo.”

  “Couldn’t the hackers have simply erased their tracks?”

  “We’re talking about security-relevant systems here that can’t just be deleted. Every transmission is recorded along with its timestamp and duration. Only the content is later deleted.”

  “And if the hackers also have access to the security system?”

  “Then they would have reversed the manipulation before we landed, before someone could notice it. But that didn’t happen. Thus they were successful at implanting their code, but they didn’t manage to remove it afterward.”

  “Andy, these are far-reaching accusations.”

  “These are just the facts. To make accusations, I need the culprits.”

  “But consider what would happen if you blame Theo. Most of them consider him a hero. You would just sow distrust and conflict.”

  “That isn’t my intention. I just wanted to lay the facts out for you. It’s up to you to decide what to do with them.”

  Ewa felt relieved, but she kept this to herself. She only knew that she couldn’t trust anyone. “Thanks, Andy. I know to highly value your insights and leads. Please document them well in case you—”

  “—encounter an unexpected incident? You’ve been watching too many crime shows, Ewa. I’m good at what I do. As long I don’t make any errors, the conspirator won’t know what I’m up to.”

  I hope so, Ewa thought. “I won’t fill the others in on what you’ve found out,” she said. “This should make your work easier. But please keep me up-to-date.”

  “Sure, Ewa. I hope I’ve done the right thing by coming to you.”

  “You hope? You don’t trust me?”

  “Trust is a big word. On a scale of one to one hundred, my trust in you is around eighty-five.”

  “Is that high?”

  “It’s only been exceeded by one other person.”