Martians Abroad

by Carrie Vaughn

  “I’m not a stooge, I’m just better than you, you nutcase!”

  “You don’t get to decide that, stooge.”

  Tenzig lost it, then, and slammed into Ethan.

  He probably just meant to smack Ethan on the chest, the finger-jabbing bullying kind of thing that would make Tenzig all smug and that Ethan never would respond to, normally. But Tenzig was angry. He was moving with force, and he wasn’t completely acclimated to the low gravity, so instead of just stepping forward and jabbing Ethan, he launched himself, his whole body plowing into him, sending Ethan stumbling back. Ethan tried to shove him to his feet, but he, too, overcompensated against the gravity. It would have been funny, but they still managed to pummel each other in the face, even if it was mostly by accident.

  More chaos ensued when everyone else jumped up and tried to move chairs out of the way to keep the guys from tripping over them. But again, the low gravity was almost worse than being weightless, because it didn’t make everything float, it just made everything slow. Which meant when Tenzig and Ethan fell, stumbling over each other, they didn’t fall all that hard, and they didn’t seem hurt.

  Enough. “Stop it!” I yelled, and took a couple of jumping steps toward them. I was thinking hard about the gravity so I didn’t end up smashing my face on the floor like a couple of the others had done. I grabbed Ethan because he was closer, wrapping my fists into the shoulder of his jumpsuit, ducking while he swung back at Tenzig, who was driving him backward. Thanks to the low gravity, I could actually haul the very tall and solid Ethan out of the way. I just made sure I was braced extra well.

  With Ethan out of the way, Tenzig stumbled, but he didn’t fall, because across the space Boris had grabbed him to steady him. Here, he was the most the stable of all of us. I nodded a thanks to him.

  The two guys were fought out, so they didn’t struggle against us very hard.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I demanded, and I didn’t even know whom I was asking.

  They didn’t answer except by glaring. I kept hold of Ethan, because he leaned into me as if looking for some stability. Tenzig, however, jerked away from Boris. This sent him bouncing a couple of steps, because he was still too angry to focus on keeping stable.

  He jabbed his finger at Ethan, at all of us. “You screwed up big. Just watch. I’ll prove it to you.” He marched out of the common space to his room, taking big bounding steps. He had to grab the doorway to stop himself from careening. I bit my lip to keep from laughing, because it wasn’t all that funny in the end.

  No one said anything, no one explained, so I looked at Charles, who was standing out of the way and looking thoughtful. “What?” I asked him, in shorthand.

  “Tenzig asked what we were talking about,” he said. “We told him.”

  “And now he’s going to tell Stanton that we’re on to her?”

  “Likely she has surveillance in the room and has been listening to everything already,” Charles said. As if that didn’t make my stomach twist into knots. The others glanced around, suspicious and uncertain.

  “It doesn’t change anything,” Ethan said, wiping his mouth. Half of his lip was swelling from where Tenzig has smacked it.

  “He’s right,” George added. “If Stanton’s listening to us now, she’s been listening to us all along. There’s nothing we can do about it, and it doesn’t change anything. We just stick together and keep a watch out.”

  The half dozen of us standing here were the ones who were in on it, who’d been with us from the start because of the accidents. We had a team. We had people watching our backs. I felt better.

  I was still holding on to Ethan, who rested his hand on mine. “You can let go now, Polly.” His swollen lips smiled. I hesitated, then brushed off his sleeve. Realized everyone was watching and took a step back.

  “You should probably get a cold pack on that,” I said, reaching for his lip before pulling away.

  “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

  Somehow, the idea of Stanton listening in on us made us not want to talk anymore.

  “We should get some sleep,” Angelyn said finally, and the party broke up. Ladhi took my arm and pulled me toward our room. I took another glance at Charles. He nodded at me, and I wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. Good work, maybe? Or keep watch, stay close. Or maybe both. I was suddenly exhausted.

  Before going to sleep I finished my report on the shuttle flight. In it, I talked about how practical interplanetary space travel was what separated us from other forms of life.

  But not by very much.

  23

  We had two more days of orientation and classwork on planetary geology. Dirt and rocks. Meteors hurtling from space and crater formation. The whole time, we waited for something to go wrong, and nothing did, except everyone getting more and more anxious. Tenzig shoved a shoulder or elbow into Ethan whenever he could. By accident, of course. It got so that Ladhi, Angelyn, and I made sure to stand nearby to run interference by stepping into his path when Tenzig got close. Ethan must have enjoyed being surrounded by girls. But nobody was smiling much.

  Tenzig tried going after Charles instead. The first time he did it, moving to the other side of the room and “accidentally” bumping into Charles, shoulder to shoulder, Tenzig started to say something surly about Charles watching where he was going. But Charles just stared at him—a cold, rocky stare, expressionless. It sent a chill down my back, and I was standing three meters away. Tenzig blinked a moment and stumbled back, not saying anything else. He left Charles alone. A rumor got back to me later that day, through George and Angelyn: Tenzig saying that Charles was psychotic, that he was going to murder us all in our sleep if we weren’t careful.

  “Well, that’s stupid,” I said when I heard it. “Charles wouldn’t do that. I mean, he could. If he really wanted to kill everyone in their sleep, he’d find a way to poison the air supply. Or maybe cut the air off entirely. Or blow up the whole colony. But Charles is more of a poison-the-air-supply kind of guy rather than a blow-things-up guy, you know?”

  They stared at me, horrified, and I squeezed my lips shut.

  “Polly, don’t ever say that to anyone else,” George said, letting out a nervous breath.

  Angelyn said, “He wouldn’t really do that, would he? Want to kill everyone?”

  I glared. “No! He’s totally normal!”

  They looked back at me with what I thought was more skepticism than was entirely necessary.

  * * *

  On the third day of our Moon visit, we were scheduled to take a field trip to the Sea of Tranquillity. Part geology workshop, part history lesson. Gather rocks for later analysis, admire Neil Armstrong’s first footprint under its protective shield. We’d make the trip in one of the small shuttles used to travel between the Moon’s various bases. Not an M-drive vessel, but I was still going to find a way to sit in the cabin and watch. Mostly these were repurposed orbital shuttles, and in a pinch most of them could rocket their way to the stations in Earth orbit. There was some big evacuation plan, like if the power and life support went out on all the lunar colonies at once, officials wanted to make sure everybody could get off, so they kept a certain number of working shuttles around at all times. Seemed like overkill to me—what was the likelihood of all the life support going out at once? It probably seemed strange because we didn’t have anything like that kind of plan on Mars. If we had to evacuate everyone on the planet—well, we just couldn’t, and that was that. Made it feel more permanent, though. Did the lunar colonies ever really feel permanent if you could see the whole Earth, close enough to get to in a reasonable amount of time without an M-drive?

  There I was, getting homesick again.

  Along the corridor to the shuttle-boarding platform, Charles hung back. I hung back with him. We hadn’t had much of a chance to talk after the fight in the common area. He didn’t seem any more inclined to talk now.

  “I think you won,” I said to Charles.

  He looked at me, raised a brow,
and seemed genuinely confused. Which was rare, so I let the pause drag on a moment to savor the feeling.

  “You won. Everyone’s scared of you. No one’s going to bother you, and you can pretty much do whatever you want. They’ve even stopped messing with me because they think you’ll come after them if they do.”

  “You don’t think I would?”

  I smirked at him. “I suppose if it was a matter of life and death. But no, I think you’d stand back and watch me flail.”

  He made a sound that might have been denial, or meant that he was agreeing with me.

  “If people don’t mess with us,” he said finally, “it means we can focus on more important matters.”

  “Like Stanton.”

  And just then, Stanton arrived to sort us into our various shuttles for the trip to Tranquillity.

  * * *

  I didn’t get to sit in the cabin, mostly because the cabin was too small, but I did get the shuttle captain to leave the door open so I could watch from the front seat of the passenger compartment. The thing wasn’t that big. A nice cozy trip.

  The shuttle copilot was also the field-trip guide, a Collins City staffer who did this for a living, flying shuttles and escorting herds of students. Stanton didn’t come with us—she was on a different shuttle.

  I pointed this out to Ladhi, who passed it along to everyone else. We’d managed to keep our core group together, along with Angelyn, George, and a couple of others.

  “Thank goodness,” Elzabeth said with a sigh. “She’s creepy.”

  “Just keep your eyes open, like always,” Charles said.

  The shuttle trip was expected to take an hour. The cabin was sparse, with thinly padded seats along both sides and small round view ports next to them, tubing and juncture boxes visible along the ceiling, and lots of warning signs about where emergency survival gear and first-aid kits were stored. And really big warning signs pointing to a lifeboat, a cramped automated lander accessible through a door in the back. In glaring red letters, the warnings didn’t inspire confidence. If something went wrong out here, there wasn’t a whole lot anybody could do about it. Even on Mars, if you were outside the colony structures, you could still theoretically survive for a while as long as you had a breathing mask because there was atmosphere, even if it was super thin. Here on the Moon, not so much. The stars glared as starkly as they did everywhere else, and the cratered surface below glowed silver, unreal almost. In another couple of hours, the Moon’s rotation would take us into night, where everything would turn dark. That was the Moon, everything black and white. Fortunately, the soft rumble of the engines sounded fine. We wouldn’t crash. Probably.

  Most everyone was quiet, looking out their view ports and murmuring back and forth with each other. I leaned forward to look into the pilot’s cabin with its wider view port, showing the lunar landscape scrolling under us.

  So I saw it first, when the copilot leaned over to the pilot and murmured, “Baz, I’m not feeling well.”

  But Baz had already slumped back in his seat, eyes closed. The guide shook him once before slumping over herself with a deflating sigh. I spent the next few heartbeats in complete disbelief. Utter disbelief. There could be no greater disbelief. Both our pilots had just passed out.

  Stanton poisoned our pilots. Just to see how good we were at getting out of this one.

  “Charles!” I gasped, my voice squeaking. Then I unhooked my safety harness and clambered out of the seat and into the cabin.

  Charles, Ethan, and a couple of the others crowded in behind me. I felt for the pulse at their necks, first the copilot and then the pilot. They both had pulses, both were still alive. I shook the pilot, yelling in his ear to wake up. He didn’t budge.

  “They’re probably drugged,” Charles said calmly.

  “Then who’s flying the shuttle?” Ethan asked. He hid his anxiety well, but not as well as Charles.

  “Polly, help me get them out,” Charles said, reaching around me to unbuckle their harnesses.

  It was tough, because only one of us could squeeze into the cabin at a time, in the narrow spaces between the seats and instrument panels. I was thinnest, so I leveraged each of them out of the seats while Charles and Ethan waited to pull them into the main cabin. At least they were super light in microgravity. The others found survival blankets in the emergency gear to try to make them comfortable.

  Somehow, Charles and I ended up in the seats, staring out the wide view port and at an immense panel of blinking lights, scanners, readouts, and buttons. I was in the pilot’s chair. Where I’d always wanted to be. I was suddenly terrified.

  The shuttle had an automatic-guidance system. It seemed to be working just fine. Everything looked normal. Nothing was flashing red, no alarms were blaring.

  “Charles, what do we do?” I asked breathlessly.

  His gaze flickered back and forth, taking in every control, and for once he looked on the edge of panic. “She must have drugged them somehow, with some kind of time release so we’d be halfway through the flight before they passed out. She’s probably watching right now to see what we’ll do.”

  Everyone in the passenger cabin heard that.

  “Stanton wouldn’t let us really get hurt, right?” Elzabeth said. “We all agree on that, right?”

  “Random controlled accidents are one thing, but this is crazy,” George added.

  Ethan was actually smiling. “Except she knows that Polly knows as much about piloting as you can without actually being a pilot. Right?”

  “Can you pilot this, Polly?” Angelyn asked, serious and hopeful.

  “I don’t know.” I couldn’t breathe. I closed my eyes and forced my lungs to inhale. Tried to focus. The most complicated thing I’d ever driven were the scooters back home. This was totally different. “The autocontrols will keep us going for a while, but we’re due at Tranquillity soon. How far are we?”

  Charles found a screen showing our route and destination. “Hundred and twenty kilometers, looks like.”

  “Can you make an emergency landing and let them find us?” Angelyn said.

  I shook my head. “No, the surface is too rough, too full of debris and craters. We have to find a flat space or else get all the way to Tranquillity for landing. I don’t know if I can do this…”

  Charles found the comm headset and hooked it over his ear. “We’ll find out what traffic control wants us to do. They’ll send a rescue, or they can talk you through it.”

  That was a good plan. I let out a shaking breath and felt calmer.

  Charles sounded very professional as he found the emergency channel and started talking to someone.

  “What’s the problem, shuttle, over?” a scratching female voice said over the speaker. Charles had switched the audio from the headphones.

  “We’re a student group on a shuttle from Collins to Tranquillity, and both our pilots passed out. No one here is qualified to pilot, but we have some trainees you might be able to talk through it.”

  A rushed conversation followed, the traffic-control official asking a bunch of questions—how many of us were there, how we were doing, the condition of the pilots. Charles said they might have been drugged, which would open up a whole other can of sewage. Worry about that later.

  They decided to talk us through landing at Tranquillity. Because if something terrible happened, at least we’d be close to emergency crews and an air lock. My heart was racing.

  Charles gave me the headset. “You can do it,” he said softly.

  “Who am I talking to?” the woman on the line asked as I fit the headset in place.

  “Polly Newton, ma’am. I’m Polly.”

  “I’m Ms. Andrews. You’re both from Mars? You have the accent.” She sounded calm. Not worried at all. My heart rate slowed.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you’re the pilot-in-training?”

  “Um. Not yet. But soon. I hope.”

  “How about starting now, kid?”

  I thought I w
as going to throw up. “Yes. Yes, ma’am.”

  She explained where the automatic-system controls were and had me confirm that everything was running smoothly. I found the navigation screen and checked—the course to Tranquillity was already plotted and we were still en route. We activated a countdown—how long until we needed to start landing procedures. She had me tell everyone to get in their seats and strap in. We strapped the unconscious pilots into Charles’s and my empty seats.

  “Okay, Polly. You don’t have anything to do now, but let me know if something changes. When you get to Tranquillity, I’ll talk you through the landing sequence, you’ll have plenty of help. It’s going to be super easy, okay?” I got the feeling she was talking down to me, but I didn’t even care. “You all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I’m here at Tranquillity control, so I’ll see you soon. Good work, Polly.”

  Nothing to do now but wait.

  I glanced over my shoulder and was relieved to find everyone sitting straight, breathing, and not freaking out. There were wide eyes, white-knuckled hands gripping each other. But no one having a meltdown.

  I glanced sidelong at Charles. He’d settled back in the seat and was staring out the view port in front. His arms were crossed, his muscles tense.

  “We’re going to be okay,” I said to him. He nodded. I had this urge to hug him. But I didn’t.

  The lunar landscape scrolled past, looking like molded talc. I ought to enjoy this front-seat view. Fifteen, twenty more minutes, this would all be over.

  When you live on a space station or planetary colony with an artificial atmosphere, you live in fear of one specific noise: hissing air. It means something has happened to the hull, the bulkhead, the outer layer protecting you from vacuum or inhospitable atmosphere—a micrometeoroid impact hole, a crack, some kind of damage, a malfunctioning air lock. There should be dozens of alarms, fail-safes, and emergency doors to seal off breaches, to warn you when something like this happens. You practice dozens of drills to go for air masks and survival suits, to use emergency-patch kits that can repair cracks and holes. It doesn’t matter how many alerts and protections there are, a part of your brain is always listening for that soft hissing of air.