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  The door opened and a stocky guy with dark curly hair and an easy grin stepped through. Cathal read the anguish in Verena’s face and his grin shifted effortlessly to a sympathetic smile with a concerned frown. “Honey, hey! Come here.” And he put his big arms around her, hugging her tenderly.

  “Doubts?” he asked softly.

  “Ja. I had no idea…”

  “Surprise: you’re human. I’d be more worried if you had none.”

  “You should know.”

  “Yes, I should. It’s my job. Everyone’s dealing with it in different ways right now. Some are going hyper, some are in floods of tears, and a few, like you, have gone to hide.”

  “I suppose I should go back. I should be showing the others that I’m part of the team.

  “In a while when you’re ready. Besides, there’s plenty of time. It’ll take a while to prep that big fecker out there!” he pointed to The Viking, the shuttle which would take them to an even larger ship, The Aldrin, and on to the new world. Verena smiled, then frowned again.

  “I think I can begin to understand how your… Vorfahren? Ah, ancestors! How your ancestors felt, the ones who left Ireland to go to America.”

  “They had a wake because it was like a death. Most of them knew they would never return.”

  “Neither will we.” Verena paused, stunned, horrified. “I only just realised: as far as my mother is concerned, I’ve just died.”

  “My ancestors didn’t have a satellite link to home. You can call her.”

  “Ja, if she answers, but I’ll never hold her or papa again.”

  “You can tell them you love them though.”

  “Will that be enough?”

  “All parents need to let their children go.”

  “This is… extreme.”

  “Yes, but it’s happened many times before. Each day the child grows they grow apart from their parents. Each day is like a small bereavement softened by love and pride: seeing how their child is learning and standing up for themselves. You’ll be able to talk to Lena and Lex, tell them what we’re doing, and they will be proud of you, Verena.”

  “You must be missing your family, Cathal.”

  “You know I’ll miss my mam and sisters. I lost my da long before.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. We made this choice together. And in a way, we’re doing this for them. All of them.”

  For a few moments, Verena buried her head in his chest and blotted out the world.

  “Happy Birthday, Verena,” murmured Cathal.

  “I was hoping everyone had forgotten.”

  “No, you didn’t really, you just wanted to play it down as there was so much else going on.”

  “Ok so, what do you think I want for my Birthday?”

  “A ticket to Mars?”

  She smiled and remembered how much she wanted this, despite the trauma of leaving her family. “Let’s go back and join the others,” she said. Cathal took her hand and they slipped back into the main chamber to stand at the back of a knot of familiar people. Some stood hand in hand as well, some arm-in-arm in small groups, and a few stood apart, by themselves. A screen showed the Mars Mission Commander, Claude Bernard being interviewed by a reporter at the headquarter offices in Cern. His deputy, Professor Liao Cheung, stood to one side.

  “… and international co-operation on an unprecedented scale, including NASA, the ESA, SpaceX and the China Academy of Space Technology. This is an extraordinary collaboration.”

  “Nothing on this scale has ever been attempted before, Commander, are you ready?”

  “Of course, we’ve spent decades developing the technology, sending reconnaissance drones to orbit and to explore the surface of Mars. This is the pinnacle of a long-term plan.”

  “The technology is impressive, as you have been showing us, but are the colonists ready? There has been much speculation about the eight-year training programme that was cut down to four.”

  Commander Bernard frowned, then smiled. Professor Liao was impassive. “The taxpayers are constantly telling us that we cost too much money. The colonists are ready now, so we’re sending them now. The first team have landed successfully, and the second team are about to board the shuttle. We’ll send the third team in eighteen months once Earth and Mars are approaching each other again.”

  “It is too soon,” commented Cathal, quietly. “We should still be in training.”

  “They know what they’re doing, it was a calculated risk to send us earlier,” said Verena.

  “Like the reporter said to Bernard, nothing on this scale has ever been attempted before.”

  “Didn’t stop you coming.”

  “No, but, ah! You’ve heard all my concerns about the lack of time the teams have spent together.”

  “We did train together.”

  “Yes, but mostly as three separate teams. We don’t really know the first team people any more than the third team. We’re almost strangers.”

  “That will change when we get there.”

  “It’ll have to, our lives will depend on it.”

  Verena turned back to the screen. The interviewer was asking the same old question: why go?

  “… and so much money is being spent on this expedition that everyone is asking whether it could be better spent on helping with the climate crisis and the flood evacuations.”

  “As I’ve said before, this mission will have massive benefits in our fight to reverse climate change. The closed ecological system techniques that we’ve developed for this mission are going to be crucial for survival on Earth.”

  “But do we really have to go to Mars to prove these techniques?”

  “If humans stay on Earth then we’re doomed. We have to …”

  “That much is true,” observed Cathal.

  “I hope it isn’t,” said Verena. “But none of us would be going if we didn’t think that humans should explore.”

  “Some would argue that it’s a survival instinct: that any successful species experiments and explores to find better ways to live.”

  “Others would argue that we’re… Aufgabe? Abandoning Earth?”

  “You’ll never change what people think unless you go and do something that has never been done before.”

  27th April, The Viking, shuttle flight – V. Meier

  The clouded globe glided past the porthole. The momentum of the space station spun the shuttle and there was nothing to stop it on its flight, nor any need. As Earth slid from view, so the insectile silhouette of the Aldrin grew on the other side. It did not look strong enough to withstand a journey to another planet, and yet it had already made six.

  The engineers had realised that there would have to be many trips to Mars, full of supplies and droids, before any humans stepped aboard. The cost of building a new ship for each trip was unthinkable, so the old idea of the Aldrin Cycler was revived. Two ships were built in space and once launched, would never land. They could only ever exist in the weightless void where their bizarre shapes could support themselves without collapsing. The abrasion of atmospheric entry, even against the thin vapours of Mars, would destroy them. The Armstrong was destined to traverse the varying gap between Earth and its nearest neighbour for as long as it would last. The Aldrin would be tethered in geosynchronous orbit around Mars.

  The Viking took the second team from the space station to the Aldrin, intercepting its loop as it swung around Earth. The pilots, Stefanie van Rhoon and Bernardo Raffellini, gently accelerated the Viking until they matched the Aldrin’s velocity. They drew alongside with the assurance that only years in simulators and five real shuttle runs could muster. The difference was that this time they would step on to the Aldrin and the ground-based remote pilots would take the Viking home.

  Despite the practice sessions it still took a full day to move all supplies and colonists across to the Aldrin. Verena was surprised to find that she was exhausted, even lifting crates in zero gravity. She felt a sense of finality when the a
irlock was closed, and the Viking peeled away, as if she had been physically disconnected from her route home.

  The Aldrin’s first journey had been the slowest, but it gained speed with each successive trip. The first team’s journey had been timed for an ‘opposition’, when the two planets were closest, and the second team’s journey was starting just as the planets were moving apart again, making the best of the window available and minimising exposure to radiation. The third team would have to wait, missing a loop in which the Armstrong would bring more supplies, coming in at the next opposition, in eighteen months.

  Like many psychologists before him, Cathal had worried about boredom and depression on a long flight. The mission planners had ensured that colonists were briefed from Earth and Mars and given long checklists of preparations to keep them occupied. What he hadn’t fully anticipated was that fifty people on board would entertain each other. The main psychological danger was the lack of space but so far, the chatter drove away the boredom. However, Cathal’s greatest concern surfaced again, that the three teams had only trained separately. They never had the chance to complete the training which would bring all those teams together and he dreaded the potential for misunderstanding. The potential for conflict on Mars.

  “Fourteen days together out of the last four years does not make us one team,” he repeated firmly.

  “You have a point,” said Verena, “but to be fair it was quite a logistics exercise to get all one hundred and fifty of us in one place.”

  “That’s no excuse. Our lives will depend on us looking out for each other.”

  “Surely we will, won’t we? We are not just going to let another human being die, especially when there are so few of us there.”

  “It’ll be subtler than that. Our team might listen to the advice from one of our own over another team. There may be disagreements over the way to do this or build that.”

  “Hah! We will get that anyway.”

  “Not so much if we had all trained as one big team, rather than three. You know how worried I am that the ‘us and them’ attitude could get out of hand. And the first team captain’s attitude could make it worse.”

  “Hal Bulman? I can’t say I like him.”

  “I don’t think he wants to be liked,” frowned Cathal.

  “Most of his team seem to be a little afraid of him.”

  “I’ve noticed that. But whenever I ask one of them an open question, they usually defend him. He seems to have their respect. Maybe there’s a good reason why he was selected.”

  “Are you becoming an optimist, Cathal?”

  “There’s a difference between optimism and blind faith.”

  28th April, The Aldrin – V. Meier

  The Aldrin had looked huge from the outside when they approached it in the Viking. Now, inside the crew compartment, fifty colonists jostled for space to review their equipment, check their itineraries, and go over their plans. It felt cramped and noisy. All Verena needed was a small study carrel to review the survey data that had been beamed back from the first party, so she felt less embattled than some. Others needed considerably more space to go through their apparatus and ensure it would be ready for work. The worst were the scientists who had persuaded Mission Control that they needed half of their instruments in the crew quarters, rather than stowed in unreachable holds, so their clutter sprawled across the rotating grav-chamber. Even Captain Suárez was moved to curse at the two physicists who had inadvertently turned the entrance to the bridge into an assault course of drifting crates and unpacked sensors. Eduardo Suárez usually indulged his intellectually gifted crew and preferred gentle cajoling, mixed with a little mild sarcasm, to blunt orders. But Dr Grayson and Dr Sharpe were left in no doubt what they should do with their sensors.

  The agricultural team were lucky: they had a whole biome dedicated to their seedbank and plants. Food production was fundamental to survival and in a closed ecological system it would also recycle and clean the air. The farmers had risen to the top of the mission pecking order with a whole segment of the ship to themselves. It was a cylinder in the centre of the ship, just behind the solar sails, that spun to simulate a low gravity, and it was lined with tightly racked hydroponic tanks, all brimming with the early stages of growth. The farmers doted on them like children, measuring out precious nutrients and checking they all had access to the lights at the edges of the racks. Visitors were discouraged, but Verena had gawped from the axial entrance hatch, along with most of the rest of the crew, and found herself mesmerised by the constellation that twinkled from the well of leaves.

  Verena knew it was night when the lights were dimmed, but her body’s circadian clock reminded her anyway. She spent the ‘morning’ strapped into her carrel, poring through the survey data, and making notes. Verena took the small clean-paged notebook that her father had given her, carefully opened it at the first page and smoothed it out with the palm of her hand. She preferred to draw sketches that would capture her thoughts, more than words. It was how her mind worked: visually, three-dimensionally. All the geologists had expected that ice would be found there, beneath the ground, because the first team landing site at Pavonis Chasma had likely been an ancient glacier. But, many days after the arrival of the first party, news of a significant ice seam had been worryingly absent. The mood of the second party had darkened as the launch date drew nearer, fearing they had chosen the wrong site. Especially Verena feared it. She had been part of the mission planning team that chose the sites and she had argued in favour of the B site at Tithonium. But saying ‘I told you so’ would be pointless as her life would depend on the decision to go to the A site at Pavonis. If they had to move everything east to the Valles Marineras, where traces of ice water had already been detected underground in the depths of Tithonium Chasma, it would be a considerable drain on precious resources and threaten their survival.

  Everything else the mission planners wanted was around Pavonis Mons: the wealth of minerals and the myriad redundant volcanic vents that would make both mining and exploration easier. Those vents would also provide temporary shelter from radiation and UV light for the first team until help arrived with the rest of the construction crew.

  It was ninety-five Martian days after the arrival of the first team. Ninety-five ‘sols’ after the deaths of Pieter, Keki, Luis, Lal and Sun. Verena and the other members of the second team were waiting on crucial news from Mars. News of life-giving water. The first team should have found water on day one. Sol one, as they called it on Mars. But there had been a deafening silence on the discovery of water so far. The first team had emergency supplies which were being recycled, just as they had done on the journey in the Armstrong ship. If water was found, there would be elation among all the teams, because the supply on which everyone’s survival depended would be confirmed. There would also be fear, because it would be certain they would all stay there, unlikely to ever come back. Cathal noted with a wry grin that such news may help to bond the teams a little closer.

  In anticipation of finding ice, the first team had built an electrolysis plant ready to take the precious stuff, melt it and break it down into its constituent parts of hydrogen and oxygen: borrowed tech from military submarines. They would mix the oxygen with a balanced selection of the gasses found in the thin Martian atmosphere and pumped it under a much higher pressure into the temporary habs at the edge of the chasm. The hydrogen would be put to work supplying the machines that mined more ice, and they could use it to start a Sabatier reaction for methane fuel, more water and oxygen. This thinking was at the core of their mission: everything used, nothing wasted.

  In theory all they would have to do was cover the top and put air locks on the mouths of the tunnels. The sealed chamber would be pumped full of the manufactured mix of gasses, close enough to be called air. But there was a yawning chasm between the theory and the practicality of spanning of a four-thousand-metre-wide vent hole to build a home. That was their challenge. Specifically, it was a challenge that Verena Meie
r would lead the construction team to build.

  Verena analysed the data that the survey teams had sent and scribbled sketches, annotated with numbers and notes. She wanted to check the massive vent mouth to the west of Pavonis Chasma would be suitable for the first true settlement on another planet. The opening measured four thousand metres across, and the tunnels were a warren that reached far into the base of Pavonis Mons.

  Verena always saw herself as one part of a team of highly accomplished engineers and technicians. Captain Eduardo Suárez saw Verena as the heart of that team. Eduardo had observed the architect taking the lead in the early planning stages, not because she asked for it, but because her team members saw it as logical. It was her vision, and she could see how all the parts should fit, so it was natural they should seek her views. She rarely told people what to do, she asked them for their advice and listened carefully. She never pretended to know everything but after she had heeded the experts, she demonstrated a powerful depth and breadth of understanding. And, Eduardo noted, Verena liked most people and most people liked her. Even those who didn’t like her seemed to respect her, which was why he asked her to come to Mars, to supervise the construction for the first dome and, hopefully, future domes.

  “Why not choose an engineer, like Eckenweber, to lead the construction work on Mars?” asked Commander Bernard at the final colonist selection meeting.

  “Markus is a brilliant engineer, but he is not quite so gifted with people,” answered Suárez.

  “He may be guilty of a little arrogance, but he has earned that with his work. We wouldn’t be able to build it without his contributions.”