“Mara’s been through a lot,” she told him with a forewarning tone. “It’s best to let her calm down on her own. She’s not good to be around when things get out of control.”
Hanson had a surprised expression on his face. “I hate to tell you this, but nobody is in control when a quake like that hits. It’s how you react that makes all the difference… It doesn’t do anybody any good to lose it like that.” He turned to the empty airlock as if he wanted Mara to hear the words he was saying, but she was already far outside the facility.
“It’s best to just give her space,” Reese warned him, eyeing him as if to let him know she was serious. She returned to her work, hoping to ignore him.
After a few agonizing seconds, Hanson left the area, and she was by herself attempting to regain the connection to the sub on her own.
Reese shook her head as she imagined Mara in her bunk room. She gathered what sense of resilience she could muster and punched some of the reset codes into the console. There were hard hours of work ahead, and now she would be attempting to restore contact with the sub by herself.
She found herself questioning if Mara was suited for the mission. It required a high degree of risk just to be here, and a certain amount of diligence to counter it. For the first time she was wondering if she would be able to count on her crewmate in an emergency.
She turned her focus to the situation at hand. She began punching the buttons to reconnect with the signal from the sub. As she ran her tests, she would soon know the fate of the entire mission, and she desperately hoped she wouldn’t have to give Mara any more bad news.
Sol 8; Mission time - 16:35
Mara struggled to take off her bio-suit, irritated that her day had been cut short by the quake. Electricity at the Hab had still not been restored. “Typical” she thought as she tossed her helmet and suit aside near the airlock doors, failing to hang them where they needed to be. She hoped to avoid her crewmates, but she could already see Dr. Aman coming for her.
“Power is out but life support is still up,” he said to her.
Mara barely acknowledged him. “Not right now, Aman,” she said as she walked past him. She went straight to her bunk room and slammed the door shut, closing it on the doctor. She landed hard on her bed. It was dark. Only the emergency lights were on, shining a harsh glare through the small bit of glass at the transom above the door. She heard Dr. Aman calling for her from outside, but she resisted the urge to acknowledge him.
Mara felt herself melting into her bed. She felt the walls falling onto her. The weight of the mission and the expectations set upon her were pinning her down in one place. The Hab was collapsing around her. She braced for the forces coming down on top of her. Her breathing was shallow and the surrounding material like a vice on her lungs.
“We could use your help out here,” she heard Dr. Aman shouting at her. She tried to ignore him. She needed quiet. She needed to be by herself.
She heard knocking on her door. “Mara?” a voice said. But she didn’t answer. She stared at the ceiling.
She was lost here on her own. Hopelessness had overtaken her. There was only one respite that she knew in times like these. She felt for the ring at her chest. She looked at the picture of him again. She could just make it out in the dim light. Her thoughts were lost in the past.
She recalled how she had been talked into the mission in the first place. “What a hopeful person she had been at one time,” she thought. She allowed the sounds of the alarms and the bright emergency lights to fade away, and with the ring in hand, she allowed herself to ignore them.
CHAPTER 4
Sol 8; Mission time - 20:10
Hanson’s hands trembled as he poured from his flask, and the adrenaline was still coursing through him. The moonshine had been bartered from one of his crewmates. Although the company frowned upon it, most miners had stashed a bit away for themselves here and there. This was the best alcohol available. It was made from dehydrated potatoes and then fermented on the rig. He was anxious for the drink to settle his nerves.
He had been checking his room for damage since he’d arrived from the drill chamber. Too exhausted to clean up much of the mess, he fell on his bed and leaned against the wall, overwhelmed with the belongings strewn about his room. He took another drink.
The room was one of the only private quarters on the Zephyr, one of the perks of being Johan’s first mate. Space was a premium here, and the room a gift for his years of loyalty to his captain. It was sparsely personalized with a few items collected over the years. There were books stacked on a nightstand, pictures from magazines taped to his wall, and assorted minerals collected from various asteroids on a shelf. There were empty spaces marked by an absence of dust where some of the minerals collected over the years had sat. The stones were likely now to be found scattered on the floor below.
Hanson found his favorite picture had been knocked face down. He lifted it into place. It was of a tropical beach with a canopy of palm leaves and an open hammock. He and his brother were standing together in the foreground, under the canopy of leaves. They were just children. Their arms were around each other, ready for a day of playing in the sand.
He stared deeply into the image, placing himself inside the scene, remembering his time there. He pictured himself swinging on the hammock, and the water nearby was as blue and vivid as the ice he had seen right here on this moon. He imagined the breeze, the sound of gulls, and the crash of waves on the nearby sand. He remembered swimming there with his brother a lifetime ago.
He was pulled from his daydream by a sudden flash of light on his monitor. The screen and communications equipment on the wall across from his bunk were flashing emergency messages of all kinds. He would delete them when he had time. There was a set of communications equipment in his room capable of transmitting to Earth or any other mining rig, but he had never used it. He’d never had a reason to. His family were the men on the rig with him.
They had seen a lot in the past few days. Morale seemed to be wavering. This wasn’t their usual type of mission, and he knew it would be hard to keep the crew content on the moon for long. He took another drink.
He realized he wasn’t getting much done as far as clean-up. He stepped outside and walked down the dust-stained corridors. He could somehow see the wear and tear on the old rig unlike before the quake. “The old bird had some of her dust shaken off,” he thought to himself.
Years of mining operations lined the sides of the hallway into the galley. The miners had slowly coated the living quarters with a history of their operations. The walls were a treasure of chemical compounds left over from the formation of the solar system. It was the dust of ancient molecules born in the furnaces of long since burnt out novae. They had traveled the cosmos, fallen into the gravity of the sun, and were inadvertently captured by the miners, only to become a smudge on their living quarters. The dust particles were the leftovers of materials once forged in the hearts of dying stars. Ashes from inside a once shining star — and they were stalking the hallways of the Zephyr with him.
Hanson walked into the small galley with only two tables for the fourteen-man crew, and he found Johan there, the captain, sitting alone with a cup of coffee. Johan was staring straight out the large window into the icy expanse with both hands on his mug. The extreme cold outside the rig had coated the carbon-fiber glass with the faintest hint of condensation on the inside of the window, and it had frozen there creating a subtle barrier between them and the world outside.
Johan had traditionally stirred a little moonshine into his coffee, and he’d tend to drink it during the most stressful parts of their operations. Hanson suspected that was why he was here.
“It’s a real mess down at maintenance,” the captain said as he approached, not taking his eyes off the view outside.
“Was just checking my room,” Hanson replied. “Pretty good tremblor.”
&n
bsp; “What do ya think? I mean, how dangerous you think it is?” Johan asked. “That’s the second quake in two days. Third in five. Crew is apprehensive. I was just thinking about what to tell them,” he said, looking up from his coffee.
Hanson tried to find what Johan was looking at outside the window, but he saw nothing but ice. “I think we tell them the truth. Tell them we don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Better than lying.”
“I don’t think the scientists know anything either. I don’t think they got a clue,” Johan said. A slight chuckle from his lungs turned into a hearty cough, and his hand went to his mouth like he was blowing darts through his curled fingers. “It isn’t reassuring, but I don’t need a scientist to tell me the ground here ain’t stable.”
“Mara told me the quakes are unexpected and probably won’t happen again.”
Johan paused to take another drink of his coffee, and as he did his eyes betrayed his calculating mind. “They got us drilling on this frozen iceberg and there’s no way of knowing what’s down there, or what we’re messing with. How can they know what we’re stirring up down there?” he asked. “We’re miners. We’re built for working on solid ground, not ice.”
“We’ve seen worse. Remember Vesta?”
“This could be a hell of a lot worse than Vesta. At least we knew that was solid. We can predict solid. What we don’t know is how stable this ice is. There are massive fractures up and down this rift. Did you see that during the landing? Looks like it gets awful choppy out there.” Johan turned to look at Hanson. “I’m telling ya, this whole ice sheet could crack and give way, take this whole rig down with it.”
“It’s not like you to turn away from a mission because of a few risks,” Hanson said.
Johan lifted his finger quickly. “It’d be different if we were mining something,” he reminded him, his voice growing coarser. “We’re only here to support NASA. There’s nothing else for us to do here. It’s a waste of time just being here. And I’m thinking about the rig. We need to get our boys some real work before they get too jumpy.”
Hanson gave himself a couple of seconds before he responded. “I just spent the entire day dropping that sub for them. They are going to need my help working it under the ice,” he told Johan.
“That’s why that scientist lady is going to downplay any dangers to you. Watch her for that. You saw she’s the one getting all the credit for your hard work, didn’t you?” Johan asked. Another chuckle led to a cough, and his hand once again covered his mouth. “Can you believe that? She’s as reckless as she is anxious. We need an excuse to pull off the mission asap. I should tell them we are leaving,” he said. “If we had the fuel, I’d have done it already.”
“We don’t have enough fuel?” Hanson asked.
“Not yet… I’m running ice through the electrolysis system fast as it can go. In this gravity it will take time to build up enough. This is the strongest gravity field we’ve launched her from. Tanks will need to be filled tip-top,” he said.
“I’ll get the boys collecting more ice tonight and keep you posted,” Hanson said.
“Good. Keep it running full-on. And don’t say nothin’ else to the men. No sense in spooking them more than they already are. And Hanson, I want you looking over those scientist’s backs when they are working that sub. Let me know if anything unusual sticks out. They know anything about these quakes, you let me know.” Johan returned his attention to his coffee and the view out the window.
Hanson wasn’t used to seeing his captain like this. He could see the worry on his face. He knew if his captain was concerned then the younger men were certain to be.
“Aye, Captain,” he said as he turned to walk the short distance to his bunk. “Johan is already done with the mission,” he thought to himself. “He had every right to question their involvement at this point,” he justified.
This wasn’t the miner’s usual work. The crew were used to working on solid footing, without having to check with NASA on everything they did. They were used to making their own decisions about the safety and risks they took. They were taking a risk just being here, but without the possibility for reward.
But Hanson knew there was something else on Johan’s mind. The miners had usually been given a percentage of their take for any operation. The more minerals and ore they extracted, the better their pay. This was standard prospector’s wages in space — an agreement they’d all signed onto when taking the job. A mission like this, with nothing to mine, meant there was little personal incentive. They were being paid a flat fee for their time, and Hanson knew that would reflect in their dedication.
It had been Astromine corporate that wanted Johan and his crew on the job for the public relations value it represented. Having their best here meant better public image at home, and that meant better recruits, and better dividends and stock prices for the shareholders. That had made sense to Hanson, all except for the part where the miners were taking all the risks.
For Astromine, this mission was about growing an industry that had a hard time convincing healthy young men to leave for off-planet work that could last months, sometimes years. Corporate hoped that a successful mission, partnered with NASA’s good image, would change the reputation of the industry being dirty and dangerous. In return, they expected to attract a new generation of engineers and recruits.
This crew trusted Johan the way Astromine hoped they would. Johan had seen them through difficult times and had never let them down. Hanson knew his presence would steady them through any difficulty with NASA, but only to a point. The youngest and freshest recruits would become apprehensive first. The last thing they needed was another quake to upset morale. Another quake would mean real danger, maybe even mutiny. Hanson knew they needed the fuel tanks ready for launch immediately.
He walked to the fuel readout and checked the status of the tanks. They were fifty percent filled. It was going to take a full array of fuel tanks and rocket power to launch in this gravity. It had been seven days on the surface, so he estimated that in another week they’d be able to launch. That was the best-case scenario, and it was not reassuring. Two quakes in two mission sols meant he would have to discuss alternative plans with Johan. That might mean leaving the Zephyr on the icy plain and moving the crew to a safer location. The rig itself would be vulnerable until it had the fuel to launch. They could always radio for another rig to pick them up if anything happened to the Zephyr, but that was likely months away. They had the food if they needed it, but not the shelter. The oxygen and water they would need could be taken from the moon. He began to feel very uncomfortable as he thought about their limited options.
Hanson ran several other checks on the Zephyr, making his usual rounds before bed. The quakes hadn’t compromised anything that would threaten their lives. Only the drill and crane itself were misaligned, ready if needed, but with a good amount of work.
He took a few steps down the row of doors towards the main bunk room. He could already hear the men arguing. Their usual banter was replaced with bickering and shouting.
As he neared the portal doorway he leaned against the wall and kicked his foot up behind him. He folded his arms there across his chest and listened. He knew these boys trusted Johan and had put their lives in his hands. That same sense of responsibility weighed on him. As he listened to them, he could hear the strain in their voices. He felt the need to walk in, hoping to put the men at ease.
“Listen,” he said to them, barging into the room. The men grew quiet immediately. “Just spoke to Johan. We don’t have time to rest up. We need to collect as much ice out there that we can. Get the rail guns and harpoons working right away. If you need to take the crawlers to get more ice then do it. We need the electrolysis system working full-on making fuel.”
“Yeah, so we can get the fuck out of here when we need to,” one of the miners shouted.
Hanson barely acknowledged the com
ment.
Another miner shouted. “Good, because this is a waste of time being here,” he heard him say.
“I said listen up… Johan wouldn’t put you in any danger that he wouldn’t put himself in. He’s here for the mission; the mission that corporate sent us on. He just told me, the first sign of any more trouble and we’re pulling out. He’s ready to go if we need to. He wants us to stay on the mission, but if it gets too hot, we’ll bail, and we’ll do it fast.”
The miners let out a collective rumble of disagreement.
“I’m not doing this shit on comp pay, man!” One of them shouted over the collective rumbling.
“Hang tight, guys. Corporate wants us to polish their image, and that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re here because we are the best — because we will do the job and do it right. Who doesn’t want to be known as the best? Who wants to leave here right when the whole world is watching what we can do? We see this through, and I’ll make sure we get the first call to the next virgin asteroid. Remember, the best deserves the best, so let’s get the ice collected and I’ll make sure you get paid.”
The miners seemed to begin to settle down. It hadn’t quite had the rousing effect that he had hoped, but it had worked, for now.
The men stopped putting their belongings away for the night. They were frustrated. Hanson was realizing the situation was worse than he had thought. He realized there had better not be another quake or there would be real trouble within the ranks of the crew. He could only keep these young men comfortable for so long.
He walked down the hall with his head down, turned off lights in the common areas, and headed toward his bunk. He stepped into his room and dropped to the mattress and grabbed the flask of moonshine out of the drawer once more.
The flask shook in his hand again as he turned it up, and the moonshine burned on its way down. He thought maybe he could talk to Mara in the morning about what she knew, if anything. Maybe she would be frank with him, tell him the truth. He knew she didn’t trust him. “It was worth a shot,” he said to himself.
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