Seconders Page 4

  Jan had spent several weeks tunnelling through an unexpectedly deep seam of porous sedimentary rock. It crumbled to the touch, the layers falling apart as it was lifted away. No one had any use for it, it just stood in the way of the goal, frustrating everyone. Johanna Einarsdottir, the geologist, was intrigued by it. ‘It shouldn’t be here’, she kept saying. ‘But it is,’ Jan kept answering, and he kept digging.

  Only half an hour into this day’s dig Jan’s attention was drawn by a dirty white seam running through one the larger chunks of rock that had been dislodged. Looking along the wall he could see a line of white straying horizontally across the face.

  “Hey! Stop a moment will you, guys.” The droids dropped their tools to their sides and backed away from the rock face. He stepped the walker up to the ragged white line and poked it with a claw. It was far softer than the basalt and it crumbled onto the floor. He scooped out a white chunk and placed it into the air-locked hatch in the tummy of the walker. After a frustrating few seconds wait, he opened the inside hatch and pulled it out into his bare hands, having slipped them out of the motion capture slings. It was freezing cold. Ice cold. And, ever so slowly, it started melting on his palm. His fingers trembled a little as he broke all the rules and placed a tiny flake onto his tongue. He screamed incoherently.

  “What happened, Jan?” asked BetaD.

  “Should we call the camp for assistance?” questioned BetaB.

  “Yes! Call the camp.”

  “Are you hurt?” enquired BetaC.

  “No, not at all. Tell the miserable bastards in Pavonis Chasma that we’ve just made history.”

  “History?”

  “Tell them we’ve found a seam of ice water on Mars!”

  Sol 104, Pavonis Chasma – Captain H. Bulman

  Hal Bulman stalked down the airlocked tunnel leading to the 3D printer workshop. There were a thousand things running through his mind: so many preparations that had been cut short by their early departure. So many problems to deal with. He’d been relieved to hear about the discovery of ice after so damned long. It was one thing less to worry about; shame there were so many more. Shame he was virtually the only one who knew about some of those worries, and one weighed heavily on him. It was the reason they’d left early. It was the stuff of nightmares. He had suffered plenty of sleepless nights since his briefing back on Earth. Now he was here on Mars where he was supposed to do something about it, but it felt like he was further than ever from putting that nightmare out of his mind.

  Hal was aware he’d become even sharper with his team than usual. He knew he was a grouch, but this was worse. Normally he didn’t care much what others thought, but he found himself hoping that one day he could explain why.

  He pushed the workshop door open and found John Shanks among a chaos of half empty boxes, loading a trolley with freshly minted polymer frames. Shanks stood and checked himself short of actually saluting Bulman. Instead, he brushed the red dust off his orange overalls and gave him a respectful nod.

  “At ease, Shanks,” said Bulman. “It’s a while since we were in the corps together and this is not a military base.”

  “Sir. But we’ve still got dangerous shit to do, right?”

  “We do. Are you taking those up to the crater?” Bulman pointed at the trolley load of frames.

  “Yeah, that’s right. I’ll take one of the droids and start assembling the first gantry.”

  “And what are the gantries for?” asked Bulman, hoping for a well-rehearsed answer.

  “The gantries are for the ground to orbit boosters to re-attach the elevator cable if it breaks,” answered Shanks, without hesitation.

  “Well done,” Bulman gave Shanks a mirthless smile. “Our plan B in case we end up down shit-creek,” Bulman added sourly, “We always have to have a plan B.”

  Shanks stood uneasily for a moment, studying Bulman’s face.

  “Well, don’t hang around, Shanks!” said Bulman. “Clean up this mess and get up to Pavonis. You know we’re on a non-negotiable deadline with this one.”

  “Deadline,” echoed Shanks uneasily. “Yes, sir!”

  Sol 143, Pavonis Chasma – J. Wojcik

  Jan was tiring of the arguments. Here was another one between the captain and the geologist.

  “Flaky?” asked Bulman, leaning over his desk, “It’s rock, woman. How can it be flaky?”

  “Rocks have all manner of characteristics, Captain Bulman,” answered the geologist calmly. “It depends on how they were formed and what forces have been acting on them. And my name is Johanna Einarsdottir, not woman.”

  “Surely that makes it easier to drill and put piles in?” answered Bulman, ignoring Johanna’s matter of fact correction.

  “It makes it easier for those piles to shift or pull out again,” Jan explained.

  “How do we fix it?” Bulman asked.

  “I’ll discuss it with the architect,” said Johanna.

  “I’m not interested in what the architect thinks. She’s on a ship full of scientists in flight, so none of them have a first-hand view of the problem. Go talk to our technicians and report back to me.”

  “Sir,” said Johanna, who turned and opened the grubby aluminium door of Bulman’s office, stepping into the boarded corridor tunnel that linked all the hab pods. Jan followed her, noticing the fast accumulation of dirt on the walls of inflated reinforced polythene. Each sheet was stretched over ribs that had been churned out by the 3D printers using resin. Already the boards and ribs were caked in the red dust of Mars, which gave off a faint metallic odour. The once clear polythene was now a muddy ochre smear and the view of the Pavonis Chasma had long disappeared behind it.

  “I don’t like the way he dismissed advice from the second team there,” said Jan.

  “Bulman isn’t a fan of scientists,” said Johanna. She didn’t seem to be complaining or judging, just making a factual observation.

  “Why?”

  “On the Antarctica exercises I was one of several people giving him technical advice. Our advice diverged because our areas of knowledge were different. He told everyone to get out of the hab except for me.”

  “Sounds like he values your expertise.”

  “Not really. I was the only one who was telling him what he wanted to hear.”

  “Well, you must have been right because all his simulation exercises were successful.”

  “Everyone was right, from the point of view of our own field of work. Captain Bulman is not a fool: I think he understood that. But he told them he didn’t have time to listen to them ‘showing off’. Either he’s very clever, and he always knows which view is most relevant, or he’s very lucky.”

  “Which do you think he is?”

  “A dangerous mix of both.”

  3

  Leo

  5th May, The Aldrin, beyond the Moon – V. Meier

  Suárez had warned of the unexpected. He didn’t have to wait long. The laid-back anthropologist, Bim den Arend, mentioned to Sam Grayson he could hear a hissing noise coming from somewhere in the hub chamber that linked to the biome. As Sam’s jaw dropped, Bim casually handed him a tiny stone and asked whether it might be related. Verena understood immediately what the tiny stone was and why Bim had found it, so did Sam. Being a physicist, he could also imagine exactly what was going to happen next. For a moment Sam froze. He was a theoretical physicist, a man for long term analysis, not action, but then his mission training kicked in. He fumbled past Bim and grabbed hold of the nearest ship comms, opening the general hail channel. “HULL BREECH! HUB CHAMBER! EVACUATE AND SEAL!”

  The alarm sirens wailed, and all was rendered in red emergency light. Debbie Starczewski and Sofia Philippou shot through the hatch door followed by Georges Fillioud, who clung to the handrail and punched in the lock code. “Hub chamber clear and sealed,” he called.

  “Thank you, Monsieur Fillioud,” answered Suárez’s voice from the bridge. “Just waiting for the biome team to report… Thank you, Dr Figueredo, hub chambe
r now sealed from both ends. Now, Mr Eckenweber, we are in need of your esteemed engineering skills, please would you suit up?”

  At no point did Suárez raise his voice. At no point did he fail to be courteous. His calm passed through the ship like an aura of protection.

  Sam examined the tiny meteoroid in his hand, less than three centimetres across, and yet big and heavy enough to punch a hole clean through the hull of The Aldrin when travelling at seventy-two thousand kilometres per hour. Of course, it was unlucky. The number of meteoroids passing through that part of the solar system was low and, given the size of the vessel compared to the enormity of space, it was very unlikely to hit. But it did. Sam remarked that the longer they spent time in space the more likely it was that they would be hit. The fact that it had happened so soon did not fill anyone with joy.

  Markus Eckenweber was Verena’s only fellow German on the ship with whom she could have a conversation in their own language. She rarely did so. Just because they could talk did not mean that we were good friends. She respected Markus, acknowledging his excellence in mechanical and electrical engineering, and his essential role on the mission. They collaborated closely on the engineering design of the planned habitation dome, and they spent much work time together. But that did not mean that she liked him. Each time she pointed out the aesthetic beauty of a proposed technical solution his pinched face gave her a sour look, as if beauty were a wasteful commodity. Whenever she sought a more beautiful technical solution, he defended the practical alternatives with greater vigour. If they found a problem, he would often make some sarcastic remark inferring that ‘the Architect’ must have foreseen it and have an answer, knowing full well that she hadn’t and that she would need his help, as well as many others, to solve it.

  Verena reflected again that, contrary to popular misconception, design is something that happens in a team, in conversation, with many minds collaborating to come to the best answer. It is not a mystical or organic process that originates within the ivory tower of one person’s mind. Well, most of the time that was true. Just now and again there would be flashes of inspiration, a vision of how things could be. Verena had a vision for Tharsis Eden One, but she readily acknowledged that she relied on a large and gifted team to do the hard work and make it real. She relied particularly heavily on Markus. Everyone was relying on Markus at that moment to save them from that tiny hole which, untended and under pressure, would stretch and tear into a gaping rent in the hull’s Whipple shield.

  They had all been trained with additional skills that would be needed on the mission. Markus’s skill was the space walk. The others gathered in the main work chamber, huddled around screens to watch the tall wiry figure climb out through the airlock and pull himself, hand over hand, along the grab rail towards the hub chamber hull. He took an agonisingly long time to examine every millimetre of the hull, even though Verena could see the point of impact. It was obvious: a steady plume of ejected ice crystals, moist air freezing and subliming on emerging into the vacuum. No doubt Markus was aware of the procedure that pumped the precious air out of the hub chamber into holding tanks, until the emergency was over. The steady withdrawal of air was reducing pressure on the hole and avoiding risk of further rupture. That did not make any of the helpless bystanders feel easier. Eventually, he returned to the tiny hole and took a tube of expanding foam sealant from his suit webbing. He aimed carefully into the hole and slowly squeezed the trigger until the plume thinned and disappeared. He kept squeezing for a long time. Verena realised that there were many layers to the Whipple shield and therefore the sealant had to be pushed into each layer, though she still felt an irrational annoyance at his slowness. Eventually, he stowed the tube and took out a roll of thin metallic sheet, measured off a length, marked it and cut it. Then he took a pneumatic rivet-gun and stapled the sheet to the hull. Each shot was aimed and executed with precision. His helmet-cam revealed a perfect square metal plate edged with exactly equidistant rivets. If it were not for the difference in colour you could be forgiven for wondering whether it was an original feature of the hull.

  “I think meteoroids often come in showers” muttered Sam Grayson.

  “Shush!” urged Trish Sharpe, his fellow physicist and other half. “None of us want to think about that just now,” she added quietly, so that only the people around their screen could hear.

  Verena had a mental image of a second tiny lump of stone hurtling through space and punching through Markus’s suit like a bullet. She surprised herself at how abhorrent she found this thought. She might not like him, but she would never wish him dead. Besides, she needed him.

  As Verena pushed this thought from her head, Markus launched himself gently away from the hull while holding onto his safety line. His helmet-cam panned slowly across the length of The Aldrin, revealing it to the watchers as if they were to evaluate this marvel through his critical eyes. Sunlight reflected along the five main hull segments, making the metallic surfaces shimmer. The first conical segment housed the forward bridge and boarding area with a circle of narrow slot windows that allowed a direct view of their destination. The second swollen belly segment housed the main crew quarters and work area, which spun slowly to induce a weak imitation of gravity at its perimeter. The third, where Markus had been working, was a smaller connecting segment. Really it was just a glorified corridor, yet it was stacked with storage for equipment. It was ringed with five photo-voltaic arrays, each one reaching out like an eighteenth-century mast under full sail. These were the main energy source and means of propulsion during flight. The fourth segment was a wide cylinder which also rotated to provide a gravitational effect for the crops within the biome. The last segment was a compact chamber housing a small nuclear reactor lined with a protective water-filled screen, positioned at the head of a cluster of five motors. The aim was to use these as little as possible, only to slow their arrival and bring them to the elevator head position over Mars. The nuclear reactor was the one concession that sat at odds with the CES mission aims. The solar sails were fantastically efficient at driving forward in a constant accelerating arc, but there was no other suitable technology for changing velocity. Traditional rocket motors would have needed an impossible weight of fuel. Nuclear reactors had been powering robot exploration devices to Mars for decades and were a proven reliable, if dangerous, technology. It was a deliberate design choice to place the reactor as far from the crew quarters as possible.

  The overall impression was of a huge metallic beetle with five shiny shells and five iridescent wings. The hull-cams showed an orange dot drifting on the end of a gossamer line, dwarfed against the solar sails. The spacewalker appeared motionless and yet he shared the same forward momentum as the accelerating ship. Beyond the sails, Verena could see the sunlit craters on a crescent Moon. Half hidden by the Moon was the diminishing cloud-wrapped ball of humanity. The Aldrin was an impressive feat of engineering and yet it was far more than that. It was strangely graceful. Form followed function, and that function was mind-expandingly ambitious: the human occupation of another planet.

  6th May, The Aldrin – V. Meier

  Verena sat in-front of her tablet-cam and recorded another message for her parents.

  “Hallo, Papa! Mutti!” She said they we’re all doing fine. That Cathal was worried they’d get bored on the journey, but they were all too busy for that: There were fifty people to talk to, so they were not going to run out of things to say too soon.

  She hesitated, wanting to avoid any mention of the hull breach that could have killed them all. Instead, she recalled the latest gossip among the crew about who might be ‘dating’ who, and where they could possibly go on a spaceship for a ‘date’. It was an endless source of amusement and conjecture which made light of their confinement and helped diffuse tensions.

  She concluded by asking them for news of home. “Liebe dich beide, tchüss!”

  Verena sat for a moment after ending her recording, staring at a point somewhere beyond her tablet, in mid
space. She looked forward to vids from Lex. He was always upbeat, always saying how proud he was to be the father of the Mars mission architect. But she could see the pain behind his cheerful mask. Not only was he losing his daughter, but he was also in danger of losing his wife. Lena had steadfastly refused to come to the camera. Lex never commented on this and neither did Verena. He always sent Lena’s love on to Verena, and she always returned it. But both knew that she would crumble in front of a camera.

  She refocused on the tablet and searched for the latest Mars bulletin broadcast on the Earth networks. Mission Commander Claude Bernard and Professor Liao Cheung were giving another interview.

  “… so how come we only hear about the loss of five colonists now, over three months into the mission?” asked the frowning reporter.

  “You will understand that we were at a critical stage,” replied Bernard, smoothly. “The families were informed and supported immediately, but we needed to keep a focus to protect the lives of the other colonists.”

  “Some are accusing you of burying the bad news with the good news of finding ice,” persisted the reporter, sitting forward earnestly in his chair.

  “That’s a pretty cynical view,” said Bernard. “I think you’re forgetting that we are pushing at the frontiers of science and space exploration. It is dangerous. We know that lives will always be at stake and so did all who signed up to go.”

  True, nodded Verena to herself, though not helpful to remind loved ones on Earth.

  “How are Hannah Huynh’s team getting on?”

  “Frustrated!” laughed Professor Cheung. “But they knew the deal, they’ll have to wait until the Armstrong has made a supply run and come back for them. The first and second teams will have built the first dome at Pavonis and established all the equipment necessary for survival. When Huynh’s team arrive, the colony can grow and start planning for the future.”