Mars Crossing

1 Welcome to Mars

Through the viewport there was nothing but a yellow-pink fog. Then, slowly, the fog faded, and the ridged plains of Felis Dorsa emerged out of the haze, at first misty and colorless, and then, as the dust raised by the landing thinned out, sharply delineated.

John Radkowski looked across the landscape at plains of sand gently undulating beneath a pale butterscotch sky.

Mars.

It was hard for him to contain his fierce joy. Mars!

He wanted simultaneously to cry, to laugh, and to shout out a loud cry of exaltation. He did none of these. As mission commander, it was his duty to keep the mission businesslike. Decades in the astronaut corps had taught him that showing his emotions, even for such an event as landing on Mars, was a move that would, down the line, give him a reputation for being emotional, and hence unreliable. He stayed silent.

At fifty, John Radkowski was the oldest member of the crew, and the one most experienced in space. He was short, wiry rather than overtly muscular, with gray hair cropped closely to his head. His eyes had the slow, restless motion of long years of training; he focused on the task at hand, but always part of his attention was glancing around the cabin, looking up, down, checking for that small forgotten out-of-place something that might spell trouble for the mission. One hand, his left, was missing three fingers. His crew knew better than to offer him help.

Mars! After all the decades of work, he had finally made it!

There was work to do. As commander, the other five crewmembers depended on him to get the mission done safely and bring them back home. He had better get working.

The crew was occupied with their landing tasks, shutting the flight systems down and bringing the surface operation systems up, then verifying that they were running according to spec. He knew that all of them wanted to stop their work and crowd to the viewport, but for the moment they were all too busy, even Trevor, and so he had the viewport to himself.

Off to the southeast, close enough to be easily visible through the residual pink haze, was the squat form of Dulcinea.

The field glasses consisted of a flat rectangle, about the size of a paperback book. They had been designed to function equally well with or without a space-suit helmet. He raised them to his eyes. The computer adjusted the focus to match his eyesight, and the result was as if he were looking through a window at a magnified view of the landscape.

Like Chamlong said, they had hit their landing site right on the nail, with Dulcinea no more than half a mile away. That was of critical importance to them: Dulcinea was their way home, a fully fueled return vehicle that had landed on Mars six and a half years earlier. He examined her minutely, then examined the ground between the landing site of Quijote and the return vehicle. It was sand, sculpted by a million years of intermittent wind into hillocks and waves. There was an assortment of randomly scattered rocks, some boulder-sized, half-buried beneath the sand, but he saw no obstacles to their easy travel. Good.

The viewport forgotten, he turned to the copilot’s console. The floor was tilted at an odd angle; the lander must have set down on a slope, and he had to move carefully to avoid falling. He studied the sequence of images taken during landing. Both visual and radar images had been taken, and he plotted them as a topographical map of the terrain. Again, he saw no obstacles. Good.

When he got up, he saw that Trevor, Estrela, and Chamlong were all crowded around the viewport, pushing each other out of the way to jockey for a view of Mars. He smiled. They must have been watching for the very instant he had vacated the position.

“Why look out the window when we can go out and see for ourselves?” he said. “Get your suits ready, gang, it’s time to go outside and play. Get a move on; in six weeks we’ll have to go home, and we’ve got a full schedule before we go.”

With the lander resting at a pronounced tilt, the ladder splayed out at a cockeyed angle. Climbing down was not really difficult, but it was a challenge to descend gracefully. To hell with it, Radkowski thought, and jumped, landing off balance in a puff of dust.

As mission commander, it was his task to say some immortal words for the watching cameras. He had his lines memorized, extemporaneous words to be remembered forever, written for him by a team of public relations experts: I take this step for all humankind. In the name of all the peoples of Earth, we return to Mars in the spirit of scientific endeavor, with the eternal courage of human adventure and bringing with us the voice of peace among all men.

Stumbling up onto his feet to stand on the red sands of Mars, with Ryan Martin shooting him on high-definition television out the window of the lander, John Radkowski uttered the immortal words of the third expedition to Mars. He said, “Holy shit, I just can’t believe I’m really here.”

The sand had a hard, crunchy surface, and crackled underfoot as if he were walking on a thin crust of frost. Beneath the crust, the surface under his feet had the consistency of packed flour. Tiny puffs of rusty dust billowed away from his feet every time he raised a foot, and within a minute, his boots and the bottom half of his suit had been lightly spraypainted in ochre. He felt light. They had maintained half of Earths gravity by the tether during the seven-month journey on the Quijote; the Mars gravity was noticeably lighter, and despite the eighteen months of training in Mars-simulation tanks on Earth, he felt as if he were buoyed up by invisible floats.

As he’d figured, Don Quijote had landed on the slope of one of the small ridges, and sat at a precarious tilt. Fortunately the ship had never been intended to take off from Mars, and in a day they would move their living quarters out of the cramped Quijote and into the inflatable habitat that had been landed on Mars with Dulcinea.

Behind him, his Brazilian colleague Estrela Conselheiro hopped down the ladder. She bounced on the ground, bounded into the air, and stretched her arms overhead as if worshiping the sun. “Oh, it is magnificent, is it not? Magnificent!”

Much better words than his own, Radkowski reluctantly admitted to himself.

Behind Estrela, Tana Jackson came down. “Yikes!” she said. “That’s one bodacious step.” She looked around, and caught her breath. “My god, it’s magnificent,” she said.

Finally Chamlong Limpigomolchai jumped down, negotiating the jump without any comment. Once on the surface, he pivoted slowly around to look in all directions in silence. The other two crew members, Ryan Martin and Trevor Whitman, stayed behind in the lander; they would only leave Quijote and come down to the surface when Estrela, Tana, and Chamlong rotated back to the ship.

It was everything he had wanted, what he had struggled and worked and lived for. The rust-encrusted, ridged terrain, the distant buttes barely visible through the cinnamon haze on the horizon, and Dulcinea, their ticket back to Earth, sitting ready for them, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away—he had seen it a hundred times in his dreams.

So why was he suddenly depressed?

John Radkowski had no tools for analyzing his mood. Self-inspection had never been encouraged in the astronaut corps; the main purpose of the many counselors and psychologists, according to the gossip, was to weed out the weak sisters from the active duty roster. Focus on the task, get the job done, don’t complain; that had been the motto of the people that Radkowski had worked and trained with for years. Now, suddenly, his entire future seemed to be an anticlimax; even the remainder of the six-week stay on Mars and the flight back to Earth, featuring a swingby and gravity boost from the planet Venus, seemed to him like nothing but tedium. He had been focused on reaching Mars for so long, he had never set personal goals for beyond the moment. His life, as he knew it, was over, and he had not even the faintest inkling of what would lie beyond.

A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, he thought. I’ve grasped my dreams. What do I do now?

2 Trevor

The kid who called himself Trevor Whitman stood pressed to the viewport, looking eagerly out at the surface of Mars. With half of his attention he was scanning the landscape for signs of…He had no idea, really: an alien artifact, maybe, or footprints of dinosaurs or the imprint of fossilized ferns in an overlooked rock. None of these, of course, were things they had any expectation of finding on Mars, but if nobody looked for such things, they could be right on top of them, and nobody would notice.

But with most of his attention he was not looking at anything in particular, just drinking in the sight of Mars. After seven months crammed into the tiny crew cabin, it felt good to focus his eyes on something in the distance. In the background he could hear the radio communications from the astronauts on the surface. The surface fines are more cohesive than we’d expected. Sounded like Captain Radkowski’s voice. Looks like there is some amount of salt cementing the panicles together. It is clogging up the treads on my boots, but so far no problems with traction. Definitely Radkowski; nobody else would be so concerned with the picky details like that. He tuned it out. Ryan Martin was communications officer, if anything happened—not that anything was likely to—Ryan could cope with it.

Mars, finally Mars. He watched Estrela bound across the surface, leaping and pirouetting with the grace of a dancer, and he felt a gnawing jealousy. He itched to get out on the surface, and it seemed unfair that he had to wait before it would be his turn down.

At eighteen, Trevor had yet to learn patience.

It was simply not fair.

After what had to be an hour, Chamlong Limpigomolchai came back up the hatch, and Trevor waited impatiently as the airlock cycled with the painstaking chug, chug, gurgle of the roughing pumps. The lock opened, and Chamlong’s helmeted face appeared. His suit was dusted with a light powder of ochre dust. The dust tickled Trevor’s nose like bursting bubbles of some metallic champagne.

Chamlong pulled off his helmet. He had a grin the size of Texas. He had brought with him a halt dozen rocks.

“I figured you’d be in a hurry to get outside, not so?” Chamlong said. “So I came back in to let you get a chance to go.”

“Thanks, Cham,” Trevor said. “I really appreciate it. How was it?” For the whole journey, the Thai astronaut had been his favorite friend among the adults, and his simple friendliness counted for a big reason why. The rest of the adults too often just ignored him, or gave him orders.

“Oh, kid, you will not believe how much excellent it is to get outside again, and just stretch,” Chamlong said. “I tell you, get out there, see for yourself.”

“You got it,” Trevor said. “Give me a suit inspection, okay?” The suit inspection had been drilled into them by Captain Radkowski in every one of the hundreds of practice runs for surface operations during the mission. Never leave the spacecraft until you have had somebody else go through the checklist on your suit. Never. It had seemed like overcaution to Trevor—nobody would skip a vital step on a suit. That would not just be stupid, it would be suicide. But when he’d said that, Radkowski had only given him a look like he was a child, and started out with another of his rambling astronaut stories, this one about some buddy of his who had skipped the checklist, went through a hatch with a purge valve that had been clipped open for an inspection and almost got himself killed. Actually, Trevor liked to hear Radkowski’s astronaut stories—and he made himself a mental note never to clip open a purge valve—but when they were just a way to pound home some simpleminded moral like “always take care,” they sometimes got a bit tiring. While Chamlong gave him his inspection, he thought only, Mars, I’m finally going out. Mars, I’m finally going out. Mars, I’m finally…

He hesitated on the ladder, looking across the surface. He’d seen Mars a thousand times in virtual reality simulations, of course, but this was different. The sunlight was brighter than he’d expected. This far from the sun, he’d expected the surface of Mars to be dim, but the light was as bright as any afternoon on Earth. The helmet had a visor, and he slid it around to give him some shade.

He had to do something. He jumped, a six-foot drop to the ground, and almost lost his balance when he landed. Then he tried a handstand. It was a little awkward in the suit, but after one false try he managed to balance. After thirty seconds he started to lose his balance, tucked in and rolled in a cloud of dust, then stood up.

Everybody was looking at him. It wasn’t as if he had done something actually dangerous; the transparent silicon carbide of the helmets was for all practical purposes unbreakable.

“Shit, kid,” was the voice on his radio. “You sprain an ankle, we’re not going to carry you sightseeing, you know.” It was Tana’s voice. She didn’t sound like she was mad, so he decided he could ignore her. Everybody else went back to what they were doing; examining the soil, chipping at rocks with hammers, digging little trenches. Boring.

“Mars, I love you,” he shouted, ran up to the top of the nearest dune, and then slid down to the bottom on his butt.

Mars was great.

3 Memorial

Tana Jackson wanted to run, to skip over the surface, to hop like a bunny. Adrenaline sang in her blood: I’m here, I’m here.

The Mars landscape was just uncanny. It looked hyperreal, the horizons too close, the mountains too small, the sky looking like dirty paint. She could run to the horizon in a few minutes.

She sat down on the surface and tried to scoop up a handful of the sand. It was surprisingly hard to scoop. There was a crusty layer on the surface, and when she scraped through that, the soil underneath was fine powder, like rouge, sticking together into clods that broke apart into nothing in her fingers.

Commander Radkowski stood watching them all patiently. When he had given them all time to stretch out their legs and adapt to the surface, he went back to the lander and retrieved a small chest. Then he called them to gather around a boulder. The rock he had chosen was about chest high, dark in color, carved by the wind into almost a cubical shape. “Ryan, are you getting this?”

From inside the lander, Ryan’s voice said, “I’m taping, Captain. Go ahead.”

Radkowski opened the chest and removed a plaque. The plaque was a small rectangle of black-anodized aluminum, inscribed with seven names in gold. He turned to Estrela Conselheiro.

She reached into the chest and took out a second plaque, identical in size and color to the first, but with only two names on it.

Together they bent over and laid the plaques against the rock. This time Radkowski did not hesitate over his lines. “In honor and in memory of the explorers from the first and second expeditions to Mars, we place these memorials on the surface of Mars. As long as humankind dream of exploration, you will never be forgotten.”

Estrela repeated the words in Portuguese, and then added, in English. “Mars is for heroes.”

Commander Radkowski took a step back. “A moment of silence, please.”

Tana bowed her head and looked at the ground.

“All right. As you were,” Captain Radkowski said.

Mars was just as beautiful, the colors still as intense, but after the memorial it seemed a little more sinister. If anything went wrong, they were a hundred million miles away from any help.

Two expeditions had been to Mars before them. Neither one had returned to Earth.

Tana suddenly shivered, although there was nothing wrong with her suit heater. She had known for a year that, if there was a failure on this mission, there would be no rescue.

Mars was for heroes. But she was suddenly not so certain that she liked being a hero.

4 Radkowski

Commander Radkowski returned to the ship with the cloud of aimless disappointment still hanging over him.

Ryan Martin and Chamlong Limpigomolchai were in the cabin. Out of habit, the first thing he did was to check the viewport, to see how his outside crew was doing. Tana and Estrela were working together on rock studies, Estrela chipping the outer surfaces off of rocks and Tana pressing the portable X-ray crystallography unit onto the freshly exposed surface to map the microcrystalline structure. He was glad to see them collaborating; during the voyage they had been at each other with their claws bared almost every week, and he had worried that they would be unable to work together. Chalk it up to confinement syndrome; now that there was some space to breathe, they were apparently getting along fine.

Tana Jackson was a biologist, not a geologist, but they had all cross-trained at each other’s specialties. Radkowski could see that they had taken the SIMS unit—the secondary ion mass spectroscope—out of its storage bin, but they had not yet set it up. He tuned to the general frequency, but they were apparently communicating on a private band. As commander, he could listen in, of course, but from long experience he had learned that it was best to give a crew its illusion of privacy unless there was a definite emergency.

Trevor Martin was somewhere out of sight, possibly behind the dune-form. Radkowski worried about the kid; sometimes he acted as if he were younger than his twenty-one years. Still, the enthusiasm and sheer joy of living that the kid exuded—when he was caught unguarded and forgot to be sullen and uncommunicative—was almost contagious, a drug that lifted the spirits of the whole crew. Radkowski had opposed the whole idea of bringing a crew member as young as Trevor along, but he seemed to be working out, and his presence definitely gave the crew a lift in morale. Although they pretended not to, and possibly didn’t even realize it themselves, everybody liked the kid and wanted the best for him. As long as he didn’t manage to kill himself by being impatient, impetuous, ignorant, aggravating, and generally clumsy—in short, acting like an adolescent instead of an adult—he’d be fine.

John Radkowski could hardly blame the kid for acting like a kid. When he was young, he had been a lot worse. It was only by a miracle of God that he had straightened out. Certainly none of his acquaintances, not even his own mother, would ever have guessed he would one day be the commander of the third expedition to Mars.

There are good neighborhoods in Queens, but the one John Radkowski grew up in was not one of them. The Harry S. Truman public-assistance housing unit was an incubator for raising junior criminals, not young scientists. By the time he had reached age six, Johnny had already learned that you never show weakness, and you stay alive by being just as mean as the other guy.

One time, when he was fourteen, he had been hanging around the apartment with his gang. It wasn’t a real gang with colors, just the bunch of kids he hung around the neighborhood with. They kind of watched out for each other. Stinky and Fishface had been there, he remembered. His mother was gone, probably at work at one of a series of interchangeable jobs she held at fast-food restaurants. They were bored. They were usually bored.

John and his older brother, Karl, shared a small bedroom. Karl was gone, probably hanging out with his gang—he was a member of the Skins, a real gang, the local white-boys’ gang. Karl was way cool, but he never wanted Johnny to meet his gang buddies; said he wanted Johnny to have something better out of life.

Stinky was smoking a cigarette he’d found in Johnny’s mother’s cupboard, and Fishface was sitting on Karl’s bunk bed. Karl would have gone ballistic if he’d seen one of Johnny’s friends on his bed, but Karl wasn’t there, so fuck him. Fishface was picking at the wall, the cheap plasterboard coming loose from the studs. One end was already free, and Fishface, bored, wiggled and pried at it until he worked it loose enough to pull out and look at the ragged insulation underneath.

“Shit, boy,” Stinky said, “what the fuck you got there?”

Fishface didn’t bother to look up. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? Shit.” Stinky dropped the cigarette on the floor, walked over, and reached down inside the hole. “You dogfucker, you call this nothing?”

Stinky held up what he had found: a nine-millimeter automatic, gleaming dull gray and malignant in the feeble sunlight filtering through the dirty window.

Johnny hadn’t realized that his brother had it. “Hey, Stinky, I think you’d better put that back,” he said, nervous.

“What, are you a pussy? Afraid your badass brother gonna see?” Stinky held out the pistol, pointed it at Johnny’s head, and squeezed the trigger.

“Bang,” he said.

Johnny had flinched when he saw Stinky’s finger whiten on the trigger. The trigger hadn’t moved. “You faggot,” he said.

Stinky laughed and popped the safety. “Thought you bought it there, didn’t you?” He turned the gun over, ejected the magazine, and looked at it. “Full load, too. Man, your brother is packing.” His voice held a tone of envy.

“Look, this isn’t funny,” Johnny said. “You’d better—”

Stinky held the magazine in one hand and the automatic in the other. He pointed it at the window. “Bang,” he said, and pulled the trigger again.

The gun firing in the tiny room was louder than anything Johnny had heard in his entire life. It jumped in Stinky’s hand, and all four of the boys jumped.

“Holy shit! You asshole!”

There was a huge hole in the ceiling above the window. Plaster dust and gunpowder smoke swirled in the air.

“Hey, how the fuck was I to know it was loaded?” Stinky shouted. “I took the clip out.” As if to show it, he rammed the magazine back into the gun. “It was empty.”

“Put the safety back on, you asshole,” Johnny said.

The door kicked open, slamming against the wall. Johnny’s brother was silhouetted in the doorway. “The hell you assholes are doing?”

“Oh, shit,” Johnny said. He stood up. “Hey, Karl, we was—”

“Shut up,” Karl said. He was looking at Stinky. “Asshole, give me my gun.”

Stinky pointed it at him. “Hey, man, be cool. We were—”

Karl slapped the gun out of Stinky’s hand with a move almost too fast for Johnny to see, and in the next instant he had Stinky by the throat. “You point that gun at me again, fat boy, and after I rip your balls off I’m going to shove them up your ass. Got it?” He didn’t give Stinky a chance to answer, but reached down with the other hand, grabbed the crotch of Stinky’s pants and picked him up and tossed him toward the door. Stinky staggered, bounced off the doorframe, and then caught his balance and ran.

“I ever see you around here, they won’t scrape up enough of you to fill a jockstrap,” Karl shouted after him. Then he turned around and looked at Fishface. “You got some business here?”

“No, sir,” Fishface said.

“Then get the fuck out.”

“Yes, sir!” Fishface said, and ran out of there so fast that Johnny wondered whether his feet even touched the ground.

Karl didn’t bother to look at Johnny, just reached down, picked up his gun, put the safety on and jammed it into his pants. Then he walked over and looked down on Johnny.

“Hey, Karl,” Johnny said, tentatively. He knew that he was going to get a pounding, but it was best to see if he could defuse his brother as much as he could. The sharp smell of powder and the dust from the ceiling seemed to choke all of the atmosphere out of the room. His ears were still ringing. “We didn’t mean nothing.”

“I know that, kid.” Karl sighed. “What are we doing to you, kiddo? Just what are we doing?”

“It was an accident,” Johnny said. “We just sort of found it by accident—”

Karl slapped him. Johnny saw it coming and tried to dodge, but he wasn’t near fast enough.

“What was that for?” Karl said.

Johnny’s ears were ringing from the blow. He tried to frame his words. “For taking your gun—”

Karl slapped him again, this time with no warning. “Asshole. I don’t care about the gun.” Karl raised his hand again, and Johnny cringed.

“That’s for having stupid friends,” Karl said. “Your friends are stupid, and you’re stupid, for having stupid friends. What the hell were you morons thinking about?”

“I dunno. We weren’t thinking about anything.”

“That’s right, you weren’t thinking. You’ve got a brain, but nobody would ever know, since you never bother to use it.” Karl sat down on the bed, hard, and put his head in his hands. “Oh, shit, kid, what the hell are we doing to you? We’ve got to get you out of here.”

That had been a long time ago. John hardly ever thought about his brother Karl anymore, except sometimes when he got drunk, and he almost never got drunk. By the time he had gotten into high school, Karl had dropped out of school and had spent time in jail twice.

Nobody else in the projects seemed to have noticed the shot, or if they had, they paid attention to their own business. The hole Stinky blew in the ceiling had seemed huge to Johnny, but nobody from the housing authority had ever noticed it, even when they came around once a year to do the inspection.

Yeah, John Radkowski thought, Trevor can get a little annoying sometimes. But on the whole, he was okay. Not half the trouble that I’d been.

Now that both he and Chamlong were back in the cabin, it was Ryan Martin’s turn to go out on the surface. Ryan was deeply engrossed with the computer. Radkowski walked over and put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Hey, how’s it going?” he said. “You ready to take a look around outside?”

“I’ve been checking out the Dulcinea’s systems,” Ryan said.

“So?” Radkowski said. “We checked her systems a dozen times during cruise. I can’t think that anything’s likely to have changed in the last four hours.”

“Well, sure, but now that we’re on the surface, I have a higher bandwidth connection,” Ryan said. “I can command sensors in real time now, get more than just the health check signal.”

“And?”

“These readings are screwy.” Ryan shook his head. “Take a look at this,” he said. “Here. I’m looking at the fuel temperature. The tanks ought to be holding steady at about 90K, but they’re up over 200K, both of them. Tank pressures are fine, both tanks are full, but I can’t understand these thermal readings.”

Radkowski looked at the display. “Looks like a broken thermistor to me.”

“Both sensors on both tanks? Seems unlikely.”

“Shit,” Radkowski said. “According to the mission plan, we’re not supposed to check her out until the morning. Look, why don’t you go on outside and take a walk around. If you think we need to check her out today, that’s your call, but think about it for a while first, okay? We’re all running a little bit on overload.” The commander clapped him on the shoulder. “Anyway, it’s clear to me—you need a break. Go on. You deserve it.”

“You got it, captain,” Ryan said, and stood up. “I’m out of here.”

5 Ryan

To Ryan Martin, the Don Quijote looked like nothing so much as a mushroom pulled from the ground and sitting on its half-wilted cap. Getting to Mars was a great accomplishment, and cramped and smelly as the Don Quijote had been, Ryan Martin would regret abandoning the Don on Mars. Ugly it was, yeah, stinky and cramped, but it had done the job, a dependable workhorse.

Getting back, though—getting back would be the real triumph. Dulcinea was their ride home, and if there was a problem, the sooner they found out what it was, the sooner they would be able to start fixing it.

The screwy readings from Dulcinea continued to worry Ryan. Even when he was on the surface, while he was thrilled by the beauty of the landscape and enjoyed the freedom of walking on a planetary surface after being cooped up in a soup can for seven months, with a corner of his mind he could not leave Dulcinea alone.

Anomalous readings are always a worry; they indicated something malfunctioning. There were other readings that looked wrong to him as well, readings that weren’t obviously wrong, like the temperature reading, but still they had a wrong feeling. He hoped that the commander was right and it was a sensor failure. God knew that those happened often enough; sensors sometimes seemed like the practical jokers of space, always choosing the middle of the night or some equally inconvenient time to wake up a crew for what would invariably turn out to be a false alarm—but he would be more comfortable if he knew for sure.

The timeline called for them to check out the return ship on the second day on Mars, when the crew was refreshed by a day’s sleep after the long day spent in landing and surface preparations. The commander didn’t want to alter the plan, and he respected that, but if it had been up to him, he would have gone to Dulcinea immediately.

He couldn’t help but glance over at the return ship, temptingly waiting for him just a kilometer away. Dulcinea looked not at all the way Ryan thought a rocket should look, a squat bullet shape aimed skyward. Instead, Dulcinea was a lumpy potato, with just the faintest wisp of white vapor trailing away from the oval tanks at the bottom of the first stage.

At various times, the Dulcinea had been nicknamed by the engineers at the launch complex the pig, the turd, and the flying cow. It was low and fat. With only the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere to penetrate, streamlining had been sacrificed for efficiency, and Dulcinea had all of the aerodynamics of a fire hydrant. One of the launch technicians had accidentally referred to it as the “incredible flying turd” in the presence of a reporter. He had been reassigned to launch sounding rockets from Kodiak Island, and the nickname had been hastily changed to “the amazing flying toad” for damage control. That nickname stuck, although in the presence of management or the press it was always, carefully, the Mars Return Launch Module.

Ryan worried about Dulcinea. If there was something wrong, he wanted to know now.

6 The First Expedition to Mars

Don Quijote had landed on the edge of a region of Mars known as Felis Dorsa—in Latin, “the cat’s back,” or, less literally the cat mountains, since dorsae was the term Mars geologists had given to flat plains broken by long, low ridges. The site had been chosen with great care. The sand between the ridges was smooth and level enough to make a safe landing, but it was an easy traverse by Mars buggy to the Valles Marineris, the feature that the geologists had picked as the highest priority exploration target. The dorsae themselves—low, rounded ridges a hundred miles or more long—made for an additional target for investigation, as geologists continued to argue over the geophysical origin of the ridges. In the Martian tropics south of the equator, the Felis Dorsa featured a relatively mild climate—or at least mild for Mars, where temperatures of a hundred below at night were normal.

And, as a bonus, the two previous expeditions to Mars had both landed in the northern hemisphere, so while the crew of Don Quijote could not claim to be the first humans to the red planet, as a consolation, they could claim a new hemisphere.

The crew, however, had a goal of achieving a different first. They planned to be the first crew to return from Mars alive.

The American expedition to Mars had been planned for decades.

Going to Mars is easy. The difficult part is getting back. If you want to come back, you have to send to Mars an interplanetary ship capable, and with enough fuel, to launch from Mars to Earth. Getting that ship to Mars, fully fueled, is a herculean task.

It is far simpler to land a vehicle unfueled.

The expedition was planned to launch nearly a decade ago, in 2018. The first ship of the expedition, Ulysses, would have no crew. Ulysses would carry with her a robotic fuel manufacturing plant and a payload of liquid hydrogen. While the hydrogen was bulky, over the course of a Martian year it could be used to manufacture twenty times its weight in rocket fuel from the thin Martian atmosphere. When, two years later, the Agamemnon came with the exploration crew, seven astronauts handpicked for their scientific training, Ulysses would be fully fueled for its return, and waiting for them.

It was a plan that had been invented in the 1990s by two Mars enthusiasts, Robert Zubrin and David Baker, and refined over decades to distill out the maximum possible amount of exploration for the smallest investment from Earth.

As a backup, a second return vehicle, with its own fuel-manufacturing plant, was launched to follow behind them on a slower trajectory to Mars. It would be ready if the Ulysses should fail. If the Ulysses worked as planned, the second ship, Dulcinea, would be targeted to a second spot, to wait for a future expedition.

That was the plan. Painstakingly, piece by piece, the building blocks of the expedition were put together by the exigencies of politics and engineering.

Nobody paid attention to the Brazilians.

With the new millennium, chaos had come to the nation once known as the Soviet Union. During the height of the ferocious Russian civil war, rather than let their factories be destroyed and their knowledge lost, a team of rocket engineers had come up with a plan. They had stolen an entire factory, the main Khrunichev engine manufacturing plant, from the digitally controlled milling machines right down to the paper clips in the supervisors’ desks. They got out just days ahead of the tanks of the retreating Russian People’s National Liberation Front, pounding across the steppe toward Moscow under orders to leave no building, no tree, no bridge or lamp post or telephone pole standing.

They had fled to Brazil.

Brazil welcomed the refugees, and, in turn, the refugees had absorbed the Brazilian spirit. Over the decades, Brazil had gradually grown into the economic giant of South America. It was, as ever, a nation of contrasts, where abysmal poverty shared the same street with ostentatious wealth and corporations combined businesslike cool with wild Latin exuberance. Over the first decades of the millennium, Brazil built up its space program. At first, Brazil was no more than a junior partner in the American-led space station. Partly with its own growing engineering force, and partly with the engineering skills of the Brazilo-Russians, they developed an offshore launch platform at Alcântara, just south of the equator, to launch commercial satellites on Brazilian-designed and Brazilian-built launch vehicles.

But nobody—or, nobody outside of Brazil—expected that they would go to Mars. And nobody in the world would have guessed that they would get there first.

The Brazilian expedition was audacious. Rather than choosing a conservative landing site on sandy plains near the Martian equator, they chose to land at the north pole of Mars. This was a calculated move. The northern polar cap of Mars consists of a two-mile-thick glacier of ice, covered in the winter with a blanket of carbon-dioxide snow. To the engineers of the Brazilian space program, ice was more valuable than gold. Ice—ordinary water ice, hydrogen and oxygen—is rocket-fuel ore. During the Martian summer, when the pole received twenty-four hours and forty minutes of sunshine each day, they would mine ice out of the polar cap, electrolyze it into hydrogen and oxygen, and then chemically convert that into methane and hydrogen peroxide, fuels that could be stored at the polar cap without the use of refrigeration.

By their bold choice of landing site, they had simplified the mission, eliminating the requirement to haul hydrogen from Earth and the need to use cryogenic coolers for the propellant they manufactured. They simplified their mission in another way as well. Instead of having a separate vehicle land first to manufacture the propellant, they used a single landing. One vehicle with a two-man crew would land on Mars, manufacture their return fuel, and take off. They bet the mission on the ability to make fuel, with no mistakes, the first time. There was no margin for error.

They launched in 2020. Two years before the American expedition.

Even if they had wanted to, there was no way to hurry the Agamemnon; it had to wait for the Ulysses to make its fuel and for the planets to return to the alignment needed for the launch. The American expedition watched, envious and impotent, as two astronauts planted the Brazilian flag on the snows of Mars. They watched, by video broadcast, as the Brazilian astronauts filled their fuel tanks for their return and used hydrogen peroxide-fueled snowmobiles to explore the polar regions surrounding their spacecraft’s landing site.

As the world watched on live television from Mars, the two Brazilian astronauts played in the polar snows, drilled core samples, and analyzed the embedded soil and dust for information about the climate and biology of Mars. The worldwide audience cheered. They had no hint that anything was going wrong.

One moment, João Conselheiro, the expedition leader, said calmly, “Puxa, estou muito cansado.” I am very tired. He sat down on the snow.

The second astronaut walked toward him. “Acho que tem alguma coisa errada com o João.” I think something’s wrong with João. Then, a moment later, he fell over.

Neither astronaut moved again.

After two months—the camera broadcasting all that time—the Martian winter blanketed their bodies with snow.

The Brazilian commander João Conselheiro had left behind a young and beautiful wife who was also a pilot, a geologist, and a mountain climber. Her name was Estrela Carolina Conselheiro.

7 Tana

The way I figure it,” Radkowski had once told Tanisha Jackson, “I’m the one who’s actually black. You’re just another nice white girl from the ’burbs.” Between the two of them it had been a joke, how he had grown up in a ghetto, raised by a welfare mother with a brother in jail and a father he’d never met, while she had been raised in Pennsylvania suburbs, with both parents doctors, and gone to an expensive private school.

Tana never complained, but nevertheless it stung her when people called her white. Just because she hadn’t been raised in a ghetto and didn’t talk like a gangsta, that didn’t mean she wasn’t black. She still had to deal with all of the crap that people brought her because of her skin color.

Nevertheless, she got along fine with Radkowski. She’d even slept with him a few times. Once had been in the space station, but that hardly counted, since sex was one of the very first things that everybody did when they got into space, once they got over throwing up. It was a rite of passage, and Radkowski, who had been a veteran, was a good person to initiate her. But she’d done it a few times afterward, too, and although she was by no means in love with him, it had meant more to her than just a pleasant way to kill an hour or two.

She’d thought about it a few times on the voyage out, but even when they were alone together—something that didn’t happen very often in the crowded ship—he had given no indication of interest. It would be bad for the crew morale if they had paired off, Tana had realized, and Radkowski knew it, and was keeping it cool for the sake of crew unity. Although that didn’t seem to be any barrier to Estrela.

There was, as far as Tana could see, no actual written requirement that a female astronaut from Brazil had to be a sultry spitfire who flirted with every single male she met—but Estrela was, and did.

Tana was compact and muscular and wore her hair in a practical style, barely longer than a crewcut. Estrela, on the other hand, was tall, slender, and curved in all the places that Tana wasn’t. And to top it off, she had kept her thick hair. Tana advised her that it was impractical, possibly even dangerous, for her to wear it long, but Estrela had ignored her, and in freefall, when her hair floated around her face like a dark halo, even Tana had to admit—if only to herself—that it looked glorious.

The rest of the crew—even Trevor—had gone back inside. Only Tana and Estrela stayed on the surface to watch the sunset.

Even in training, back on Earth, they had often watched the sunset together. “When I can, I always watch the sunset,” Estrela had told her. “It is so romantic.” Sometimes Estrela brought her boyfriend of the moment. Sometimes she was alone.

The Brazilian Mars expedition had taken no video of the sunset; at their landing site, the sun had never set. By now she knew it would be unwise to remind Estrela of that. The first international expedition had taken videos of the sunset, plenty of them, and she had seen them, of course, but the real thing was surprisingly different. The colors were subtler. The sky was a luminous hue closer to a golden bronze than the washed-out pink of the videos, and shaded imperceptibly to almost pale blue as she looked toward the sunset, a ball of light hovering above the yellow sun. The sun was smaller than the sunsets she was used to, and in the deep shadows the ridges of Felis Dorsa were a dark brick, almost brown.

They watched the sunset in a companionable silence.

It was cold. Through the day Tana’s suit cooler had been rejecting heat nearly at full capacity, as her body produced more waste heat than she lost by conduction through the well-insulated material. Now, though, in the cool of the Martian evening, even at their landing site near the equator the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero, and the microcontroller monitoring the suit’s environment was sending electrical currents through thin-film heaters pressed against the thin inner lining of the suit. The soles of her feet, in thermal contact with the cold Martian soil, were cold; so were her hands.

The sun had set. Behind them, the external lights of Don Quijote beckoned. Tana checked the time. “Yikes!” she said. “I think it’s time to come in now.”

In the dark, she couldn’t see Estrela’s face behind her visor, only the reflection of the afterglow. It could have been anybody with her. For a moment Tana allowed herself the indulgence of imagining it was John. She reached out and impulsively touched Estrela’s hand.

She wondered what Estrela was seeing.

8 The Second Expedition to Mars

When the news came that the two astronauts of the Brazilian expedition to Mars had died, John Radkowski should have already been on the way to Mars. He had been picked to be the copilot of the Agamemnon.

Eleven days before launch, Jason, the nine-year-old son of the woman who lived in the duplex next door to Radkowski, had been doing his house chores. Radkowski had a lot of sympathy for Jason; he knew how hard it was to grow up without a father. When Jason went outside to empty the garbage, he had found a skunk in the garbage can. Apparently the skunk was foraging through the garbage, slipped into the can, and had been unable to get out.

The skunk had been sleeping on top of the garbage. Little Jason was old enough to have known that he should leave a wild animal strictly alone—let alone never to mess with a skunk—but the skunk had been so cute, and seemed so harmless, so pettable.

So he petted it.

Jason’s shrieks from next door fetched John immediately from his study, and with his first whiff, it was obvious that he had encountered a skunk. John told him to take all his clothes off, right there in the backyard, and when Jason had done that, he sprayed the screaming child with the hose. He followed that up with two gallons of tomato juice. It was only after he washed the tomato juice off with another spray of the hose that John discovered that not all of the color was juice; a part of it was blood. The boy had been bitten as well as sprayed.

John cleaned the wound as well as he could with soap and water and taped gauze over it, telling Jason over and over that everything would be okay. Then he doused him one more time with more tomato juice, and, ignoring the stink, took him to the hospital to have the bite sutured. Meanwhile, another neighbor called the animal control. The skunk that had bitten Jason had scrambled away when Jason knocked over the can after being sprayed. The animal-control officers shot three skunks in the area, and it was impossible to tell which one had bitten him.

One of the three had been rabid.

Even though it had been the child next door that had been bitten, not him, John Radkowski was taken off the crew roster for Agamemnon because of possible secondary exposure. The three-year trip to Mars was too long to take even the slightest chance, and there wasn’t enough time before the launch window to wait to see if he had actually been exposed to the disease.

Agamemnon, the ship that John Radkowski should have been on, had launched perfectly. It had flown the interplanetary traverse to Mars with no problems, except for one event so trivial and embarrassing that it wasn’t even mentioned in any of the videocasts with the Earth, but only on the private medical channels.

Shortly after launch, one of the crewmen complained of athlete’s foot.

It spread among the crew, and by the time Agamemnon was approaching Mars, everybody had it. Normally, natural skin bacteria keep fungus in check, but zealous biological contamination protocols had killed the natural bacteria, leaving the fungus to multiply unchecked.

A spacecraft provides an ideal environment for fungus to grow: crowded with people in close contact, and warm, and with the crew able to take only sponge baths.

Once they found that the fungus was beginning to eat their clothes, they took to placing their clothing in the airlocks to expose them to vacuum for an hour every day.

Agamemnon made a flawless landing on Mars, only a few hundred feet from the return ship Ulysses, waiting for them on the eastern edge of the Martian plain known as Acidalia. By this time, the fungus had spread to the air filters. One of the crewmen opened up a panel behind one of the navigation computers and found rot growing on the circuit boards. A quick inspection showed the entire electronic system of the ship cultivating slime.

On some of the crewmen, the fungus infection moved to the sinuses. They were treated with antihistamines to dry out the sinuses and make the nasal environment less hospitable, but it was almost impossible to combat the infection.

It was never declared on the public channels, but the Agamemnon expedition was rapidly turning from a triumph into a disaster.

They launched from the surface of Mars early, using up their safety margin of extra fuel to fly Ulysses on a faster trajectory that swung by Venus on its way back to Earth. The revised trajectory would shorten their return time by nearly a year but required an additional rocket burn at Venus to correct the orbital inclination. But by this time they were beginning to be desperate.

As Ulysses passed Venus, telemetry relayed to Earth from Ulysses sent down the data that the fuel valves were opening in preparation for the burn, and then Ulysses fell silent. After an hour, telescopes from Earth revealed an expanding cloud of lightly ionized gas, primarily oxygen, in the position where the spacecraft should have been.

A faint, miniature comet glowing in the sunlight marked all that was left of the Ulysses and her crew.

Much later, the accident investigation hoard determined that the fungus must have entered the fuel-controller electronics. Nothing had happened until the command was given for the engines to fire, and then far too much had happened. Instead of a smooth, controlled burn, the short circuit in the electronics had resulted in both fuel lines opening, but no ignition. The computer should have sensed this and shut down the engines, but the same short circuit had rebooted the computer, and fuel and oxidizer continued to pour into the combustion chamber. When the mixture of fuel and oxidizer finally did ignite, the result was not a rocket, but a bomb. Ulysses had been doomed.

John Radkowski should have been on that expedition. A rabid skunk had saved his life.

And now he was on the third expedition to Mars.

9 Transmission

This is station Trevor Whitman, broadcasting live, live, live to Earth from the red planet. Hello, Earth! I want to tell you, Mars is great! I really love it here, and I have to say that, you know all those months of training that I was complaining about, you know, well, just the thrill of being here has made it all worthwhile. It’s so great! Did I say that already? I think I said that. Anyway, it’s great.

“Today we landed, I guess you saw the descent pictures? From the lander camera? Okay, after we got down, we went outside, and I went out bouncing around. The colors, I guess you know that Mars is red, you know? But it’s really more than that. I can’t describe it, it’s more like a, well, yellowish reddish brown kind of color, sort of a caramel color, but there are so many shades, and it seems like the longer I look, you know, the more colors I can see, more shades of yellow and orange than you could ever name, and pinks and yellows and even some kinda purple colors, too.

“These space suits are great; you hardly know you’re wearing them, and the gravity’s so light it feels like you could jump up forever. I climbed up one of the sand dunes today. We haven’t seen any dust storms or anything yet, I mean, we just got here, you know? But it’s great. I think I said that. I can’t think of what else to tell you. There are mountains in the distance, sort of ridges. They aren’t really that far away, and doesn’t look like they will be so hard to climb, so maybe we’ll go climbing them after we check out the return spaceship tomorrow. I can’t wait.

“And to all of Trevor’s friends, I mean, to all my friends on Earth, this is Trevor Whitman, saying, see ya!

“Station Trevor Whitman, signing off. Talk to you again tomorrow! Goodbye, Earth!”

10 The Boredom of Infinite Space

Space exploration conjures up in the imagination an image of endless horizons, infinite vistas of space. The reality, however, is quite different: The main enemy for a space crew to combat is the unrelieved boredom of confinement. The cabin of the Don Quijote could best be described as a prison cell, but with less of a view.

In the seven months it took to fly to Mars, there was plenty of make-work, but little in the way of actual useful tasks to do. They had measured cosmic-ray exposure, made measurements of the solar wind, and used the long baseline of the Quijote from the Earth to make precise timing measurements of gamma-ray bursters. But these experiments could be done just as well from an unmanned probe; their main justification had been to give the crew something to do.

By the time the Quijote had been in space for a month, the crew’s unofficial motto had been, “Mommy! Are we there yet?”

A month before the landing, when Mars was little more than a small yellow smudge on the velvet sky, Ryan Martin had complained, “I’m going out of my mind. I don’t care what happens on Mars, just so long as it’s not fucking boring.”

“And I don’t care if I never see the inside of this damn cabin again,” Trevor Whitman added.

As circumstances would have it, they both had their wishes granted.

11 Dulcinea Down

As the systems engineer, the task of checking out Dulcinea and certifying her ready for launch was Ryan Martin’s responsibility. Chamlong Limpigomolchai, the Thai geologist, had cross-trained on the propellant manufacturing plant, and probably was more familiar with its workings than Ryan was. He was Ryan’s assistant and backup on the EVA.

EVA—what an awkward term. Extravehicular activity. They had agreed before the mission that they would root out and destroy all of the confusing acronyms that space missions were prone to use, but somehow the use of the term “EVA” for any venture through the airlock of the Quijote’s cabin had slipped out of their net. They needed a new word. Marswalk, maybe.

Okay. He walked over and touched Cham on the shoulder. “Ready for a Marswalk over to the Dulcinea?” he asked.

“I’m go,” Chamlong said.

“Then let’s suit up.”

Ryan’s suit was a light blue and sported a Canadian maple leaf painted on the chest. Each suit was color coded, to avoid possible confusion as to which astronaut was out on the surface at any given time. Chamlong’s was the one with yellow-and-black stripes, and had the icon of an elephant neatly painted on the front.

The Martian EVA suits—Marswalking suits—were a marvel of engineering. They had a hard shell for the torso with armadillo joints at the abdomen, shoulders, and crotch. The chest carapace was made from a lightweight composite, coated on the outside with an inch of foam thermal insulation. The sleeves, gloves, and leggings were piezoelectric fabric, as light and flexible as ordinary cloth, but woven out of a fiber that contracted with an electrical signal to a perfectly contoured pressure fit around the limbs. It was a compromise design: The chest carapace allowed easy breathing, and the contractile fiber allowed free arm and leg motion. The only bad part was that you couldn’t scratch your nose. It seemed to Ryan that his nose always started to itch just the instant he put the bubble helmet over his shoulders. He had discovered that if he twisted his head to the side and stretched his neck, he could rub his nose against the radio speaker mounted just above his shoulders.

Each suit had a thermophotovoltaic isotope generator mounted in the middle of the back, which provided electrical power for the oxygen production machinery. Heat from the radioactive isotope’s decay was pumped through capillary-sized tubes in an undergarment to keep the chest and abdomen warm; the arms and legs were electrically heated to keep the astronauts from frostbite in the subzero Mars temperatures.

The tough silicon-carbide bubble helmets absorbed ultraviolet and had a visor like a baseball cap that could be turned to keep the sun-glare out of your eyes, as well as a second dark visor that could be pulled down like sunglasses.

All in all, they were practical suits, providing a self-contained Earthlike environment for traveling on Mars. On longer Marswalks, like all space suits, the suits would collect feces and urine for recycling. Ryan had long ago learned that when an astronaut stops in the middle of a task with an abstracted look on his face, it is proper to look the other direction and not bother them for a moment.

Once they had suited up, checked each other’s suits, and descended to the surface, it was only a short trek over to the Dulcinea. The upper stage and the four huge booster tanks sat on the sand like a slightly battered beer can surrounded by ostrich eggs. The whole assembly rested on four mantis legs.

Ryan circled her, doing an external inspection. Both of the oxygen tanks were venting a thin, wispy trail of white vapor. That was okay: it indicated that the tanks were full. The zinc white of the thermal paint on the booster tanks was shaded lightly pink at the bottom with dust; that was expected, though, and the thermal modeling allowed for it. Other than that, there was no external damage visible.

“So far she looks okay,” he said slowly. There still seemed something just a little bit odd about the condition of the ship, as if there was something he should have been seeing but wasn’t, but he couldn’t put a finger on what it might be. “Anything look out of place to you?”

“Negative here,” Cham replied.

“Pretty good condition for an old lady who’s been sitting out in the cold for six and a half years,” he concluded. Maybe that was all it was; he had expected the ship to look more worn, dirty, and wind-battered from half a decade of exposure on the surface.

Between the number two and number three booster tanks was an access ladder that led to a small circular hatch. He climbed up while Chamlong waited on the sand below. The hatch release rotated freely, and he unsealed the hatch and wriggled through the opening, which was just barely big enough to take a Mars suit. An awkward design, but for the return ship every kilogram counted, and there was no need for a hatch that would allow a more dignified entrance. Inside, he flipped the circuit breakers on, and lights illuminated the cabin.

It was a near duplicate of the cabin on Quijote, except for the presence of an additional set of indicator panels for the chemical machinery that had manufactured the fuel. The computer system was already running. He powered up the CRT to read out the internal displays, and while it was coming to life, looked over the mechanical gauges.

They had checked the fuel a hundred times by radio link, both before launch from Earth and during flight. But from the gauges inside the cabin, the indicators didn’t make any sense. What they showed should have been impossible. The computer came up, and he turned his attention to it. It didn’t make any sense, either.

Chamlong poked through the hatch and took a look at him. “What is it?”

“Wait one,” he said. He sat down at the system engineer’s station, staring at the readings but not really seeing them. What was different?

Dulcinea had been designed to sit on Mars for two years, making propellant for the return mission. It had instead been sitting on Mars for nearly seven, waiting for her crew. But it still had propellant; the almost invisible plume of white vapor from the tanks proved that. So why were the sensors wrong? The mechanical gauges for the two oxygen tanks read zero; the two pressure gauges read screwy—one tank impossibly high, two other tanks way too low.

Ice, he thought. Mars is cold and dry, and the Martian atmosphere contains very little water vapor. But over the course of seven years, the tiny hit of humidity the air did hold would condense onto the cryogenic lines and freeze. Some ice could be clogging the sensors. That shouldn’t be a failure mode, but building up over seven years? He called up a schematic for the mechanical gauge and studied it.

Maybe. He showed the drawing to Chamlong. “Right there,” he said. “The heat exchanger pipe for the intake manifold. Suppose it built up a layer of ice?”

“You think that could really happen?”

Ryan shrugged. “Got any other ideas?”

Chamlong looked at the drawing. His doctorate was in planetary science, but he also had a mechanical engineering degree and a good understanding of the mechanism. “If I were to go down and tap on the manifold, if there’s ice on it, it might break it free.”

Ryan was dubious. “I suppose it’s possible. Might adhere too tightly, though.”

“I’ll try it.” Chamlong stood up. “If I knock some of the ice free, the reading will change, and at least then we’ll know what the problem is. If not—well, if not, we’ll have to think of something else.”

Ryan nodded. “Okay, sounds good. At least it’s a plan, anyway.”

He would remember that phrase, later. “Sounds good.”

Ryan toggled over to an exterior camera—still working line, after sitting useless for almost seven years—and watched Chamlong bend over and select a rough volcanic stone about the size of a brick. He picked it up, walked to the first of the booster tanks, and then moved around behind the tank to where the heat exchanger was.

“It’s hard to get in close enough to see very much, but I think I see some ice,” Cham’s voice said over the radio link. “You ready in there?”

“I’ve got my eye on the gauge.”

Steadying himself with one hand against the tank, Chamlong gave it a light tap with the rock.

The gauge hadn’t moved. “Nothing,” he reported.

“Okay. I’m going to try a little harder.”

Chamlong drew back the rock and gave the side of the aluminum manifold a solid thump. A snowstorm of white burst out of the interior, settled on the ground, and then quickly evaporated in the dry air.

The gauge jumped, overshot, and settled down. 22.8 tons. Perfect!

“You did it,” Ryan said.

“All right! Okay, let’s try the other one.” Chamlong went to the second tank.

There was a thump, and ice broke free. The needle jumped and pinned itself against the high end of the gauge. A moment later there was a shuddering that he could feel from inside the spacecraft, and then Ryan heard Cham saying “Oh, shit!” over the radio. He looked at the view from the external camera but could see nothing—the entire outside view was blanked out in billowing white. Red warning lights started to come on in the cabin—overpressure, flow-rate monitor, temperature alert.

“Shit!” he said. “Cham! Are you all right?” There was no answer. He jumped out of the chair and out the hatch. He ignored the ladder and jumped down into the sand, raising a plume of dust that momentarily obscured his vision. “Chamlong! Report!”

Through the haze of cloud and dust, a torrent of liquid oxygen was jetting out of a broken pipe. It was insanely beautiful, a foaming fountain that glistened in the most delicate shade of pale blue. The pipe was waving back and forth, spraying the precious liquid over the spacecraft, and he could see the panels bowing as they encountered the sudden shock of liquid oxygen at a temperature of a hundred and eighty degrees below zero. He heard a bang—it must have been incredibly loud to be audible in the near vacuum of the Martian ambient—and on the other side of the ship, he could see that the second oxygen feed pipe had also burst. Both tanks were venting now, liquid oxygen foaming and bubbling like a torrent of blue champagne flowing across the sand, freezing and boiling at the same time.

There had been ice in the valves, oh yes. But the ice had masked a worse problem.

“Chamlong!” Ryan waded into the cloud of mist, and the faceplate of his helmet frosted over instantly. Blinded, he hit his emergency locator beacon and staggered back. “Chamlong, where are you!” He fumbled with his suit controls, overriding all of the thermal regulation to push the heat up to maximum, and then he waded back into the mist. Flakes of white, flush-frozen liquid oxygen, swirled around him, sparkling like fireflies in the sun. The yellow-and-black striped spacesuit had been deliberately designed to be easy to spot. It couldn’t possibly be hard to find him.

It was already far too late.

12 African Interlude

John Radkowski’s personal trainer, a woman named Alicia, loped beside him at an effortless jog as he sweated and clumped. She made it look so easy, but then, he figured that this was her job. “Concentrate on your breathing,” she said. “Let your arms swing freely. Deep breaths. In, out. Loosen up. That’s better.”

The dusty grass felt like rubber under his feet. It always did.

Alicia never sweated, never even breathed hard. She was running backward in front of him now, doing stretching exercises with her arms as she ran, and having no difficulty keeping the pace. Her breasts bobbed tantalizingly, the two breasts out of phase, but he figured that keeping him excited was part of her job as well. It was probably why she was running backward like that in front of him. If he didn’t like it, there were plenty of other trainers he could have chosen.

“Looks like you’re about warmed up,” she said. “Ready to do some running?”

“Ready,” he said. Actually, he felt fat, clumsy, and out of breath, but there was little point in saying that.

“Great. Here’s the trail. See you after your run.”

“Sure thing, beautiful.”

Alicia curved around and headed back, and he went on into the savanna.

It was low grass, yellow in the sunlight. In the distance a huge, solitary acacia tree stretched fractal fingers into the sky. He could see a series of gentle uphills terraced ahead of him. Not too bad. The African sun was bright but gave no warmth on his body, and the air was breezeless. He looked around and behind him.

Emerging out of the forest from a break just a few feet away from the spot he had started from, the lioness stretched, yawned, and then stretched again. The yawn revealed enormous teeth. She roared, a deep rumbling cough that tingled deep in his belly. Then she looked up, eyeing him speculatively, and began to pad after him.

The appearance of the lioness sent a thrill of adrenaline through him that nearly erased his tiredness. There was, of course, nowhere to hide. The hills ahead of him looked impossibly far away. It would be an endurance contest. He wouldn’t want to sprint too early. He kept up his pace, remembering to breath regularly. Uphill, slightly, but there was a level spot at the top of the rise.

Behind him, the lioness started into an easy lope. Her eyes glowed yellow-gold with an interior light. She wasn’t sweating, either.

No point in looking behind him. He concentrated on his breathing, on his rhythm, on staying loose. He felt good.

On the patch of level ground the lioness broke into a run, and he picked up his pace to keep her from gaining too much. He could hear her footsteps, hear her beginning to pant from exertion. This was what running was for, he thought. Man against beast, the original, pure competition. Uphill again, now, and the lioness behind him slowed to a walk. He couldn’t maintain the pace, either, and slowed down as well. Then another stretch of level ground, and they both began to run.

Then the lioness roared, and he knew that the final lap was on him. Sprint like nothing you’ve ever done, or you’ll be caught. He pushed himself, trying for new records. A minute of this, two, and he thought he was going to burst. Surely he couldn’t take any more. A hundred more feet. Fifty.

A distant bell rang in his ears, and he slowed down to a stop. Behind him, the lioness slowed as well. When he looked back, Alicia had come up beside him.

“Don’t stop, you need a cool-down. Keep moving, keep moving.”

“Right.”

“That’s better,” she said. “Pretty good time. You sustained an average of 320 watts for almost ten minutes there. Watch your form on the sprints, you’re going to turn an ankle if you’re sloppy.”

“Got it,” he said. “Turn an ankle. Bad.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “Good workout. See you in two days?”

He doubted he would see her in two days—now that they were on Mars, he would probably be too busy to keep up his exercise routine—but there was no point in saying that, either. “It’s a date, beautiful.”

He raised his hands to his head. He couldn’t see anything—it looked for all the world as though he was in Africa—but he could feel the helmet, and grabbed it and pulled it up. Africa shrank to two dimensions and pulled away.

He put the virtual reality helmet back on its stand by the treadmill, grabbed for his water bottle and took a long pull, then pulled back the curtain on the exercise booth. The exorcise sessions were tiring, but he always felt refreshed and fully energized after. He wished that Don Quijote had a better exercise facility, one with a full sensory reality. In Houston, he would have been able to smell the lion, would have felt a breeze, and the texture of the ground under his feet would have varied as the terrain changed. He would have been able to climb the rocks, swing from trees.

More than that, though, he wished he could shower after exercising, but in the cramped cabin of Don Quijote that was clearly impossible, and, as always, a sponge bath was the best he could do.

With Ryan and Chamlong out checking the Dulcinea, and Tana and Estrela out on EVA samples, the cabin seemed almost spacious. Trevor should have been monitoring the radio, but as Radkowski grabbed his sponge, he saw with some disgust that Trevor’s eyes were masked and his attention distant, involved with some sort of simulation or video game. So nobody was paying attention to Ryan and Chamlong checking out the Dulcinea.

Well, if there had been a problem, Ryan or Tana would have contacted him by an emergency page, which would get to him wherever he was. Still, it was a breach of discipline.

While he started his sponge bath, he reached toward the radio to listen to what the rest of the crew was doing. And, as if in response—he hadn’t even yet turned on the radio—the emergency page lit up. Somebody had hit the panic button.

He hoped that it was nothing, but John Radkowski’s instinct for trouble was already giving him warning signals. He had the sudden sinking feeling that they were in deep trouble.

13 Chamlong

When Chamlong Limpigomolchai had been a small child, perhaps five or six, his parents took him to a temple. The golden Buddha had seemed uninteresting to him, but he vividly remembered the Nagas, the huge, brightly painted, seven-headed serpentine monsters who guarded the stairs. After the temple, his mother had taken him to have his fortune told. The fortune-telling woman had seemed more like a clerk than a wizard; she had taken his mother’s money, barely glancing at the number written on the lucky stick he had shaken from the fortune tube, and pulled a sheet of tightly rolled paper out of a pigeonhole and handed it to her without a word of comment.

YOU WILL TRAVEL FAR, the fortune said, BUT WILL ALWAYS RETURN HOME.

Later, when he went to Japan for schooling, he thought, yes, I am traveling far, but I will always return home. The thought gave him comfort; he knew that he would not die while abroad. And later, when he went to study for a doctorate in an American university by the name of Stanford, he thought, yes, this is it, this is what the old woman meant when she said I will travel far. But I will return home.

And he traveled further yet. His fellow astronauts had always marveled at the calm way that he faced danger. He had been on extravehicular activity once—a spacewalk—and an incorrectly programmed robotic arm had moved unexpectedly, severed his tether, and tossed him spinning into space. He had turned on his emergency locator beacon—his radio had been smashed in the same accident, so he had no idea if his beacon was being heard, or even if anybody had seen the accident. He turned down his oxygen partial pressure to the minimum to extend his breathing time and calmly closed his eyes to meditate. Two hours later, when he was picked up, he opened his eyes, nodded once, and said, “Ah, there you are.”

And now he was on Mars. But I will return home to die. As it had been all his life, he knew that, no matter how bad things might get, he would make it home.

The fortune-teller had been right about his traveling, far more right than she could possibly have known.

But she was wrong about his returning home. Chamlong Limpigomolchai, the farthest-traveling Thai in the history of his country, would never leave Mars.

14 A Funeral on Mars

Chamlong Limpigomolchai had been a quiet man. John Radkowski had always respected Chamlong—he had thought that of them all, he had been the best among the crew—but he had never really understood his motivations. He did his job, never complained, never did less than his best, and never talked about his personal life. Now he would never know him better.

Radkowski had seen people die before; death was an old familiar feeling. First was the shocked feeling. Why? Then, following hard on after the first shock, was the awful feeling of relief. He had known that the mission was going to be dangerous, and that there was a good chance that one or all of them would die. And now it had happened—and he was still alive. He damned himself for what he felt, but he couldn’t help feeling it.

And, following the relief, the guilt.

The Mars soil was harder to dig in than he had expected. There was a slight breeze, which helped carry the dust of digging away, but by the time they had dug a grave for him, all of their suits were painted a dull yellowish orange. Tana and Estrela carried his body. After Tana had done the autopsy, they had put him back in his suit for burial. Radkowski had looked over Chamlong’s meager personal effects, trying to find something that would have meaning for him. He had no photos, no letters from home. He knew that Chamlong hadn’t been married—that had been one of the criteria for crew selection—but surely he had some person at home to share his life with. But if so, he left no trace of it. The only personal item Radkowski found was a tiny yellow and red dollhouse, something that seemed almost ridiculous among his other utilitarian possessions. Radkowski carefully placed it in with the body.

“Ashes to ashes,” he intoned. “Dust to dust.” Back in the Air Force, they had their own second verse to this reading: “And if the Lord won’t take you, why, the devil, he must.” But it was one thing to say that when getting drunk over a dead friend, and quite another to say it aloud at a funeral, so instead he said, “A moment of silence, please.”

And Estrela, Ryan, Trevor, and then Tana, one at a time, put a shovelful of Martian dirt into the grave, and then silently piled a cairn of rocks over it.

John Radkowski stood watching, silent with his thoughts. It’s not a disaster, he told himself. One dead, a stupid accident, we can deal with it. Thank the Lord the rest of us are okay. If this is as bad as it gets, we’re lucky.

He could never admit it to his crew, but John Radkowski was scared.

The expedition is fine, John Radkowski told himself. The expedition is fine.

15 Mapping the Disaster

The expedition was not fine. Ryan consulted by video-link with support engineers on Earth until the Earth had set below the horizon. It was annoying that the communications relay satellite that Agamemnon had left in orbit had failed; after working perfectly for seven years, it was just bad luck for it to fail when it did. Without a communications relay, they could consult Earth only during the Martian day, when the Earth was visible in the sky.

Without mission support, Ryan worked alone, late into the night.

He answered questions from the other crew members in monosyllables or not at all.

Fiber-optic probes lowered through the piping and into each of the tanks confirmed what Ryan knew: The Dulcinea’s fuel tanks were dry.

While Ryan Martin and John Radkowski worked, Tana and Estrela cooperated in leveling a patch of ground with shovels and then anchoring and inflating the habitat bubble. There was no way they could help with Dulcinea, and, regardless of the decisions made regarding their future, the habitat was needed. Once it had been inflated and the interior fittings checked out, they had a comfortable living area with, for the first time in seven months, actual privacy for sleeping and other bodily functions.

There were no firm conclusions from Earth by the time Earth had set the next day and they went to sleep. Between Ryan’s testing and that of the engineers on Earth, though, they had the beginnings of an understanding of what had happened.

Mars is a sulfur-rich planet. Without an ozone layer, far-ultraviolet radiation from the sun reaches all the way to the surface. A consequence of this is the presence of a small amount—less than a few parts per million—of highly reactive, UV-energized sulfur radicals near the surface. Over the seven years that the Dulcinea had been making rocket fuel on Mars, contamination by sulfur radicals had crept into all of the parts of the system, including the microelectromechanical sensors that measured the fuel capacity and the pipes and seals of the propellant manufacturing. The pressure sensors on the tanks had been fooled by the contamination, and the microprocessor control system, following the readings unquestioningly, had allowed the fuel manufacturing to proceed until all of the tanks held a far higher pressure than they had ever been designed for. The backup mechanical gauges, frozen by ice buildup, had failed to report any problems.

Worse, though, the energetic sulfur radicals had slowly hardened and embrittled the polymer of the seals that had isolated the liquid oxygen tanks from the propellant production system. When Chamlong had tapped on the manifold, the fragile seal ruptured, and the consequent spray of liquid oxygen had caused the seal on the next tank to burst, and in short order all the tanks had ruptured and drained their contents to the sand.

The first American expedition to Mars, the Agamemnon expedition, had had an entire second ship ready for a backup in 2022. Contingency planning, they called it. That backup ship had been the Dulcinea.

After Dulcinea, there was no spare return ship.

The crew of Don Quijote were stranded on Mars.

16 The Captain and the Kid

While Ryan Martin worked on the problems with Dulcinea, Commander Radkowski instructed the rest of the crew to continue with their science activities on the Mars surface. Whatever had gone wrong, he knew, it would only be made worse if the crew was left idle to brood it over. That included his own activities—which at the particular point in the schedule were listed as aiding the other crew members as he saw fit. None of the crew members, at the moment, seemed to need assistance.

He was getting used to the surface. At first Mars had seemed odd, the horizon too close, the rocks unexpectedly rough, the color of the light too yellow. A speckling of dark rocks gave the ridge face in the distance an oddly dappled appearance, always changing slightly as the shadows moved with the sun. Now it was beginning to seem familiar.

Trevor came up and walked next to him. Trevor’s suit was a bright lime green, so strongly contrasting against the yellowish-orange Martian terrain that it nearly made his eyes hurt. Trevor had his own list of science activities—a whole schedule of things to observe and look for, from a list contributed by the brightest students at fifty elementary school classes across America. But at the moment, he seemed more interested in Radkowski.

“Did you ever have a brother?” Trevor asked.

Commander Radkowski was startled. How could Trevor have known he had just been thinking about his brother? Just making conversation, he expected. Trevor didn’t seem to be very good at making friends and small talk, but give him some credit, at least he was trying. “Sure,” he said cautiously. “Sure, I had a brother.”

“Just one?”

“Just one. Karl. Two years older than me.” He paused. “How about you?”

“The same, an older brother.” Trevor stumbled, and then said, “No, no, younger. Why did I say older?” He laughed. “Younger. A kid brother. Brandon.”

Radkowski had known that already; he’d read the kid’s dossier. But if the kid was going to ask about his family, he would carry his half of the conversation. It was funny, on all of the seven-month voyage out, they had been bored as hell, but he didn’t recall talking about his family at all. None of the crew had asked him.

They walked on in silence, and then Trevor asked, “What was he like?”

“Karl? He was okay, I guess.” Radkowski thought about it. “Kinda bossy, I suppose, now that I think about it.” He paused, and then said, “I guess older brothers are like that.”

“You said it,” Trevor said.

“How about your brother?”

Trevor shrugged. “He’s okay.” He paused for a moment, gathering his breath. The kid was trembling, Radkowski noticed. What was going on? And then he asked, “Did you ever do anything really awful to your brother?”

Radkowski’s heart stopped for a moment, and then life went on. “Like what?”

“You ever betray him? Did you ever make him lie for you? That sort of thing—you know.”

He didn’t want to think about it. Why was the kid asking these questions? He looked around. Estrela was out of sight behind the ship. Tana Jackson was working on a rock, levering it up in order to sample the soil beneath for signs of organic material that might have been protected by the rock from the harsh ultraviolet. “One moment,” he said. “I think Dr. Jackson could use my assistance. Would you excuse me, please?”

Trevor looked disappointed, but he nodded.

Radkowski brooded over it. The kid knows, he thought. Somehow he sensed something. God, he’s a lot like I was. Was I really like that? There’s an aura of guilt over me. I wonder if the others can see it?

17 Radkowski

John Radkowski had grown up without ever meeting his father. His mother and an aunt had tried to raise the two boys as best they could, but they had been wild, and paid little attention to adults, or to any authority figures. More than anyone else, it had been his brother Karl that had raised him.

Karl’s gang was the Skins. The Skins were every bit as tough as the black gangs and the Hispanic gangs and the Vietnamese gangs, and they made sure that everybody knew it. When they moved into an area, resplendent in their purple Dacron jackets, with their skull tattoos and pierced eyebrows and buzz-cut hair, everybody with any sense quietly found another place to go. Even the other gangs mostly steered clear of Skins turf.

Johnny had done a little boosting, some drugs, but wasn’t in any of the gangs yet. He didn’t really like what drugs did to his head, but it kept him cool with the other high-school kids, and his school was one where it was not wise to stand out.

Karl disapproved: He wanted Johnny to fly straight and grow up to be somebody, not some punk-ass low-life criminal like him. He was constantly telling Johnny to stay out of trouble. You’ve got some brains, he said. You’ve got something on the ball. You don’t want to end up as just another one of the dead-enders and burned-out crackheads in the projects. But Karl was a hotshot gangbanger himself, and, although he did everything he could to discourage Johnny, he was the only role model that Johnny had.

Johnny was a sophomore in high school, not flunking out, exactly, but he was careful not to get grades that would get him noticed.

Weasel was a year older than the rest of Johnny’s buddies; he’d been held back in school. He had a driver’s license already, and a car. On that Thursday night, they had driven into Brooklyn, into a neighborhood where they wouldn’t be recognized. They’d cruised by the storefront three times, checking it out. It closed up at midnight, and the car was idling at the end of the block, the four of them sitting inside smoking and talking, waiting for the cash register to get full.

“I don’t know,” Johnny said. “I tell you what, you wanna just go back, pick up some girls, maybe get high?”

“You crazy? No way,” Weasel said. “You gotta do it, man. You ain’t chickening ’cause you’re a fag, are you?”

Fishface gave him the gun.

Johnny shoved it in his waistband. He didn’t feel very good. The smoke was beginning to make him light-headed. He didn’t have to use the gun; he could just show it, and the guy would open the register right up. He definitely wasn’t going to use it.

A simple transaction: Johnny would show him the gun, and the cashier would give him the money in the register. Easy. Anybody could do it.

“So what’cha waiting for, pussy?” Fishface said.

He opened the door, took a deep breath, and pulled his T-shirt out over the gun to keep it from being quite so noticeable. The air was a relief from the stale, smoky air in the car, but he barely noticed. He walked the quarter block to the store.

The store on the corner had bars over the dirty glass window. A glowing orange worm in the window flickered UDWEISER. He stopped at the counter by the cash register. It sold Lotto tickets, cigarette lighters in the shape of buxom women, gum, condoms, and cigarettes.

After a moment, the cashier—who was also the owner—looked up and said, “You want to buy cigarettes, you better show some ID.”

He pushed the shirt over the handle of the gun, exposing it. “I don’t—”

I don’t want anybody to get hurt, is what he’d started to say, but he didn’t get that far.

The man said, “Shit!” He reached under the counter and pulled out a shotgun.

Johnny had to shoot, there wasn’t any choice. He didn’t even have time to think, but only to grab the gun and fire. At the same time the shotgun went off with an incredible concussion, and Johnny thought, I’m dead. A rack of Stolichniya behind him blew apart, spraying him with shards of glass and vodka. Johnny’s shot hit the owner and jerked him backward. A small bubble of blood appeared in his chest and popped. He dropped the shotgun, a surprised expression on his face.

Johnny dropped his gun and ran.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. A simple transaction. His buddies were waiting with the car, but even in the confusion of the moment, Johnny realized that going to the car would be stupid; the sounds of the shots had certainly drawn attention, and they could track down Weasel easily enough from the license plate.

He ran down the street and into an alley, jumped up and caught the lower rung of a fire escape, then across two roofs and then down into a subway and over the turnstile. No train on the platform, so he ran up again and outside. Three Mocks away, and the Pitkin Avenue A train was waiting at the elevated platform. He ran onto it, panting, and changed to the F train at Jay Street. Only when the train had pulled out, when he could see he wasn’t being followed, did his heart stop racing.

His efforts to avoid being tracked had been useless. A bystander had noticed the car full of a gang of teenage delinquents loitering in front of the convenience store when the shots were heard, and written down the plate number when it had sped off.

And there had been a security camera.

When Weasel had returned, police had already been waiting for him. Half of the neighborhood watched as they took him to the station for questioning.

“You moron,” Karl said. “What the hell kind of trouble are you in this time? Spill it, asshole.”

Johnny didn’t have any real choice. He’d never been able to keep anything from his older brother anyway. He told him the whole story.

“Shit,” Karl said. “You sure do know how to pick friends, you. That asshole Weasel’s no friend of yours. The cops push on him, threaten him with a little time if he doesn’t talk, you know he’ll roll over so fast you won’t even see him move.”

“Shit, Karl. What am I going to do?”

“You’re gonna do nothing. You’re going to shut up and sit tight. If the cops come here, tell ’em you know nothing, got it? You’ve been home all day. I’m going to talk to the police.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“Shut up and trust me.”

It was two days before he saw his brother again.

Karl had gone directly to the station, asked to see a detective, and told them he did it. The detective called an attorney and two more cops as witnesses, told Karl his rights, and asked him if he wanted to say that over again. Karl did.

The police were overloaded with crimes to solve, and had no compulsion to put any extra time into investigating one that had already been solved. The loose ends didn’t matter; with a confession from Karl, the case was closed, and the police had no reason to go after Johnny.

It was Karl’s third offense, and he got twenty-five years, no parole. The convenience store owner had gotten shot in the lung. He was in intensive care, but would probably pull through.

“I’m doing this for you, asshole,” Karl told him. “I’m inside, but I got contacts. If you stray off the straight and narrow, I’m sending somebody after you to break your teeth. You dump those rotten friends of yours and fly straight. I want you to keep your nose so clean that when you pick it, it squeaks. You gonna be the teacher’s pet. I’m taking the fall for you to give you a chance, you asshole, and you better use it right or I’m going to be pissed. Don’t think I can’t pound your ass just because I’m inside. I got friends.”

Johnny nodded. He was crying. It was the last time in his life that he would ever cry.

“I got some money saved up,” Karl said. “Guess I can’t use it now. It’s enough to put you in a boarding school upstate. We gotta get you out of this shithole we call a ’hood. Get you a scholarship, maybe one of those ROTC things, whatever it takes, just get yourself into a college, and never come back here, you got that? Never come back.”

18 Meeting

It’s chickenshit,” Trevor Whitman said. “Chickenshit! How the hell can the tanks be empty?”

They sat or stood around the tiny fold-out tray that served the Quijote as a conference table. “Does it matter?” Ryan said. He was sitting on the arm of the pilot’s station, leaning back with his eyes closed. He hadn’t been sleeping, and his face showed it.

“They were full when we took off, they were full when we came in for a landing. How the hell could you have screwed them up so that they’re empty?”

“I explained that,” Ryan Martin said. “I’m not going to explain it again.”

“Why is irrelevant,” Commander Radkowski said curtly. “What I’m looking for right now is suggestions as to what we do about it.”

“Perhaps Mars is cursed,” Estrela said. “The first expedition, the American expedition—they all died. Everybody who comes here dies. Now we’re going to die.”

“What does the mission contingency plan say?” Tana asked. “Is this covered?”

“The contingency plan,” Radkowski said, “says that we restart the propellant manufacturing plant on Dulcinea and make new propellant.”

“So what’s the problem?” Tana asked. “We replace the corroded seals, we weld the broken lines, and we run. Yeah, maybe, we miss the original launch window, but we’re okay. Right?”

“The problem,” Ryan said, still with his eyes shut, “is that we can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“What a propellant manufacturing plant does is to convert the reactor heat into rocket fuel,” Ryan said. “You need energy.”

“Yeah?”

“The energy came from a little Brayton-cycle nuker that was landed with the Dulcinea. The nuke uses a turbine to convert the reactor heat into electrical energy. That means moving parts. The degradation mechanism is for dust to get into the hearings.”

“The bearings are shot?” Tana said.

“Bearings corrode, then they freeze up. The engine seizes, welds the parts together.”

“So then you’re saying that we have to replace—”

Ryan raised a finger. “No coolant flow, thermal overpressure bursts the pipes. When the coolant’s gone, the reactant core overheats. The fuel rods expand and break out of their sleeves. End result, the reactor is a useless chunk of hot metal. Repair it? We can’t even get near it.”

“Chernobyl?” Trevor asked. “You’re saying we’re sitting next to a meltdown?”

“Not so extreme.” Ryan raised both hands, palm up. “We’re not getting sprayed with radioactive smoke, if that’s what you’re asking. But the bottom line is, propellant manufacture is majorly dorked. It’s out of commission. For good.”

“So, you’re saying that the contingency plan is fucked.”

“Nobody really thought we’d still need the nuke.” Ryan shrugged. “I guess nobody really thought at all.”

Everybody was silent.

“So what do we do?” Trevor said. “Are we stuck here? How long will it take for the rescue expedition to get here?”

John Radkowski shook his head. “There won’t be a rescue expedition,” he said.

“But there has to be one,” Trevor said. “When Earth finds out, they’ll—”

“We’ve already reported the situation to Earth,” Radkowski said. “We’re on our own. You know the political situation back in America. Hell, the only reason the expedition was approved at all was that the politicians thought it might take attention away from the worldwide economic depression. Two pairs of ships for the original Mars expedition. Two. That’s all that they ever built. What are they going to rescue us with? Quijote was the last ship we had. You were at the preflight briefing, you know that.”

“The Brazilians?”

Estrela shook her head. “We are a poor country, you know, not like you rich North Americans. We could only build one ship. We couldn’t even afford to send a ship to bury our own astronauts. We have nothing.”

“So what do we do?” Trevor said.

Radkowski nodded his head. “That’s the question, isn’t it. That’s the question.”

Nobody had anything more to say.

After a while, Radkowski said, “Okay, I can see we’re not getting anything done here. Hack to your duties, everybody. Ryan, Tana, think it over and come up with some options.”

“You’re saying that we’re dead, aren’t you?” Trevor said. “We’re dead. We just haven’t fallen over yet.”

Nobody replied.

19 The Sacrament of Confession

His mother was Catholic, but John Radkowski could barely remember going to church. He had not gone since he had been what, in second grade? Before they’d moved to the projects, anyway. The church had seemed huge to him, and the people inside solemn and stiff. The voice of the priest had echoed across the vast interior like a huge cave.

It had been years since he had been back to New York. The neighborhood was like an alien landscape, dirtier and more broken down and, yes, even a little frightening. There was nothing for him here now anyway. The only person he had really cared about was his brother, and Karl had died in prison. His mother was still here, still living in the same dingy little apartment in the housing project, but she had refused to see him. A neighbor told him to go away, that she didn’t want to ever talk to him again.

The church was gray stone, and looked as if it was built to last for millennia—it probably had been. He was slightly ashamed for visiting a Catholic church. Catholicism was for immigrants, Italians, and Mexicans. It’s lower class, he thought. Not something for a college graduate.

Friday afternoon. The confessional was at the back of the church, and the dim indicator light above the carved wooden door showed that it was in use. Outside, a few older women were waiting quietly, kneeling. When they left the confessional, they went directly to the altar rail. He loitered inconspicuously until he saw nobody else waiting.

Stained glass saints looked down. Their faces were glowing, but their expressions were cold and unforgiving.

He entered quickly, knelt, and crossed himself. He was surprised to realize that he still knew how to do it. The booth was dark and smelled of velvet and of the perfume of the previous occupant. He felt grateful for the dark, and the anonymity.

When he heard the dry whisper of the window sliding open, he said, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” When there was no response, he remembered the rest, and added, “It has been, ah, twelve years since I have been to confession.”

“Your voice is unfamiliar,” the priest said. The priest’s voice was ordinary, conversational. “I don’t think I’ve heard you before.” The priest sounded young, perhaps not much older than Radkowski. It wasn’t something that Radkowski had expected. He wondered if the priest was new.

“No, Father.”

“That’s okay. Welcome to our church. You are Catholic?”

“Yes, Father.”

“How have you sinned?”

“I—” Radkowski had never told anyone his secret, and suddenly he realized that he couldn’t. His tongue was paralyzed. “I can’t say it, Father.”

“Ah. More than just not going to Mass, I take it?” The priest chuckled, as if sharing a joke, but at Radkowski’s silence, he added in a more serious voice, “Well, then, can you be a little more specific? One of the ten commandments?”

“A mortal sin, Father.”

“Can you tell me about it? Don’t be afraid, nothing you say will shock me. I am here to listen, not to judge you.”

Radkowski shook his head without saying anything.

“It would be best if you told me, my son. Do you need advice? Do you need to talk to the police?” After a moment of silence, the priest asked softly, “What did you come here for?”

“I don’t know, Father.”

“Are you seeking absolution?”

“Yes.”

After a moment, the priest said, “I cannot absolve you if you do not confess.”

“I’m sorry, Father.” He paused, and when there was no reply, he said, “Am I damned?”

“That is not for me to judge, my son. But you must remember this, that there is one above us who loves you unconditionally, no matter how far you have fallen or what your sins are. If you cannot tell me how you have sinned, at least tell me, can you make reparations to the one you wronged?”

“It is too late for that, Father.”

“Ah.” A soft sigh. “It is God who will be your judge, not I. I will pray for you, and I have faith in His mercy. Go forth and do your best to sin no more. That is as much as any mortal human can ever ask.”

The next day, ROTC cadet John Radkowski was commissioned into the Air Force as a second lieutenant. Six months later, he was sent to Africa.

20 PLANS

I need to talk with you,” Ryan said.

Estrela was lying face down in her bunk. “Go away,” she said.

“This is serious. I need to talk with you before I go to the Captain.”

Without looking, she grabbed a sheaf of papers—technical manuals for the mass spectrometer—from the reading ledge and clasped them over her head. “I’m not listening.”

“Look, I think there might be a way back. For some of us. But I have to talk to you.”

Estrela rolled over, scattering the papers, and looked at him. “I’m listening.”

In the darkness, it seemed to Ryan that her eyes were glistening. He wondered if she had been crying. Estrela? No, not her. She was cool and beautiful and played with hearts like children played with marbles. She would no more cry than a statue.

“Here’s the way I see it,” Ryan said. “We need a return ship. Dulcinea is dorked big time. Forget her. There was the Ulysses, but she’s gone. But there is a third return ship on Mars, and it’s still there.”

“Jesus do Sul,” Estrela said.

“I’m serious here.”

“Jesus do Sul,” she repeated. “Our return ship. Santa Luzia, you’re right—it’s still there.” She sat up suddenly. “Martin, it’s at the north pole. That’s half the planet away. How could we possibly get to it?”

“I don’t know. If it’s still there, we’ll think of something. What I need to know is, is it still good? After seven years on the surface, will it still fly? Can we use it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

21 Driving Lessons

Ryan spent two days examining maps and orbital photographs, trying and failing to plot a workable way to get them north. It would not be an easy journey. They had over six thousand kilometers to travel—four thousand miles—over territory that had never been viewed from the surface. The territory was rough, and it was unlikely that they could maintain a very high speed. His plan was that he and Estrela would set out first, at the dawn of their seventh day on Mars. They would drive north and east on the two dirt-rovers, checking the terrain and plotting courses around any major obstacles. The others would follow in the rockhopper.

The dirt-rovers were technically called single-person extravehicular mobility units, or SPEMUs. In the crew’s campaign to eliminate acronyms, the nickname “dirt-rover” had stuck, since they had oversized balloon tires designed for travel on a variety of hypothetical types of Martian soil.

They were two-wheeled vehicles, looking like a comic-book exaggeration of a steroid-enhanced motorcycle. They featured enormous tires with knobby protruding treads like polyps growing on a bagel, and a light aluminum-lithium alloy frame that allowed the Mars-suited rider to recline against the spherical tanks that held oxygen and consumables. Each was as brightly colored as a molded plastic toy, with colors carefully chosen to make them stand out against the landscape: Day-Glo shades of turquoise and green that fluoresced almost painfully bright in the ultraviolet-rich Martian sunlight.

No one had ever ridden one on Mars.

Ryan found it both easier and harder than his rides in the simulator on Earth had led him to expect. The traction on Mars was worse than he’d expected. The oversized tires bit into the surface, but tended to spin uselessly in the soil, digging down rather than giving traction. After some experimenting, he found that if he was very gentle on the throttle, careful not to accelerate faster than the wheels could bite, he could slowly build up speed. Stopping and turning was a similarly gentle process he made a note to make sure to leave plenty of stopping room in front of obstacles.

Ryan was meticulous and cautious in learning how the dirt-rover handled on Mars, checking each maneuver point by point. He found that it was far easier to keep the dirt-rover upright than it had been in the simulator. He could heel the dirt-rover way over, and in the lighter gravity, he would have several seconds before it would tall over.

After gaining a cautious familiarity with how the dirt-rover handled on Mars, he looked up and caught a glimpse of Estrela, practicing on the second dirt-rover.

“What the hell are you doing!?”

“Hey, Ryan! This is a blast!”

“Stop!”

Estrela stood up in the seat, leaned back, and popped the front wheel up off the dirt. The bike pivoted on its rear tire in a neat turn. Ryan noticed with dismay that, for all the apparent danger of the maneuver, she managed to do a turn in about a tenth of the radius of one of his carefully calculated, gently banked curves. The front tire came back down, and she leaned forward and throttled up, firing a roostertail of dirt behind her. She sped up to him. Just before he thought he would have to dive out of danger, she yawed the bike around ninety degrees and skidded to a stop, plowing up a hill of soil in front of her. Like the turn, he noted, it was a far faster way to stop than any he had managed.

Where had she learned to drive a dirt-rover like that? It certainly wasn’t in the manual.

“Loosen up,” she said. “You handle that bike like it’s made out of glass. My grandmother drives faster than that. Come on, I’ll give you some lessons.”

While they were practicing on the dirt-rovers, Radkowski and Tana were unloading the rockhopper from its stowage bin on Dulcinea.

The dirt-rovers had been designed to give extra mobility to astronauts on the surface of Mars, but had not been intended for long distances. They had no redundancy in the drive system, and the mission regulations forbid the crew from taking a SPEMU any farther from the habitat than the astronaut could walk back in case of a failure.

The rockhopper, the pressurized Mars buggy, was far larger and could carry more equipment. The official name was pressurized vehicle for extended extravehicular traverse—a PVEET—but nobody could even agree on how to pronounce that one, and people giggled every time the acronym was used. Unlike the SPEMU, the PVEET was designed with articulated wheels that could actually step over any rocks that might be in its path, so “rockhopper” became its name. It featured a pressurized cabin, so that the astronauts could remove their suits, although the manual noted that the cabin pressurization was not a redundant system, and they should always wear a pressure suit when the vehicle was in motion. It was built for a crew of two.

The rockhopper was an odd-looking vehicle. The crew pressure vessel was a decahedron of green-anodized aluminum-lithium alloy, with pentagonal viewports of transparent silicon carbide that gave the crew windows that looked ahead, ahead and down, and downward to the left and right. Mounted in front of the crew cabin was a jointed robotic arm that could be used to pick up samples, tip rocks out of the way, or even lift up one of the dirt-rovers and carry it over an obstacle. Behind the crew cabin was the drivetrain and the power plant, thermal radiator wings, pressure tanks for consumables, and a small omnidirectional antenna that could transmit either to the orbital relay satellite or back to the habitat module. Every spot of bare metal was either blanketed by layers of flimsy gold multilayer insulation, or else anodized in the distinctly un-Martian color of lime green.

After Tana and Commander Radkowski unloaded it from its storage bin, it unfolded like a spider. The whole vehicle sat on six wheeled legs, each leg a short triangular truss with an independently powered, wire mesh wheel at the end. The legs were articulated, and could be lifted or dropped to clear obstacles. It seemed surrealistically complicated. The effect was rather that of a mad Victorian metalwright’s mechanical octopus.

With Radkowski in the cabin, the legs straightened under it and it stood up to its fullest extent, stiff-legged, the cabin at the top of a tower almost twenty feet in the air. Then it squatted down, and stood up again, and then lifted up one leg at a time, doing mechanical calisthenics as Radkowski checked the mechanical systems.

“Checks out,” Radkowski’s voice said. “I’m ready to take it out for a checkout cruise. Ryan, you there?”

“Right here,” he said.

“Okay. Stay listening on this channel and ready to fetch me in case I have mechanical difficulties.”

“Copy,” Ryan said. “You expecting problems?”

“Just going by the book.”

The rockhopper set out, the legs rolling up and down with the terrain with a weirdly organic floating motion. Ryan watched it climb up the nearby dune, vanish into the valley, and then reappear on the face of the next dune.

Then it was out of sight.

“Come on,” Estrela said. “You’re supposed to keep listening, the boss said, he didn’t tell you to just sit there. Now, come on. You drive like a baby. First, you have to learn how to get traction. Watch me. When you start up, you lean over like this…”

22 Trevor

Once again, Trevor thought, the commander has told him to stay inside while the others—the adults of the expedition—went outside and were doing the fun things. He was afraid, he said, that Trevor would slow them down or get in the way.

Trevor was beginning to hate the commander. It seemed to him that Ryan and Estrela were having the time of their lives riding the dirt bikes, and piloting the enormous rockhopper vehicle looked like it would be a blast. He had practiced it enough times in the virtual reality simulation; he bet he could pilot it a whole lot better than the commander could. But, no, he had to stay inside while the adults played.

Tana was inside with him, but that hardly made it any more fun. She was wearing a set of headphones to monitor the conversation from the outside, and meanwhile was calling up Mars maps from the computer, seated at the copilot’s station with her back to him. Quite pointedly ignoring him.

So screw her.

Yeah, if only he could do just that. Tana was, in fact, a bit reticent about showing off her body to the men on the crew. Quote unlike Estrela, who sometimes seemed to be deliberately showing off her curves. Nevertheless, in the months together on the ship, when he thought she wasn’t looking, he had seen plenty of Tana’s body while she was exercising or changing. Lean and muscular, with dark brown skin that was—when she was exercising, anyway—shiny with sweat, he could just imagine her legs wrapped around him, his hands caressing the slippery chocolate skin—

Yeah, sure. As if she had ever looked at him twice. Not likely. Time to think about something else, guy. Think about music, how about.

Trevor sang stomp songs inside his head. The stomp lyrics were as if they were spoken directly to him, only to him. Negative Ions was his favorite band, and no one else could ever understand how their songs were beamed directly to him:

That’s me, Trevor thought. I’m Abbas abd’el Sami; wandering with the wind.

“Stop it,” Tana said without turning around.

Was she talking to him? “Stop what?”

“Stop your bouncing around. You’re shaking the whole spacecraft.”

He had been tapping his toes to the music in his head. Well, he’d been dancing, just a little. Yeah? So, suffer, he thought, but he knew better than to say it. Tana outranked him on the crew—everybody here seemed to outrank him—and it would be unwise to cross her openly. If he did, he might never get a chance to ride one of the dirt bikes.

Trevor knew that he was, in fact, the celebrity on board. Estrela had her half-hour recording session every day to send her messages to her fans in Brazil back on Earth, and Chamlong had recorded his messages in Thai and in Cantonese to send back to his supporters, but as for the rest of the crew, whenever there was an interview, Trevor got more questions than the rest of the crew put together. Even the potatoes born in the last century knew who he was, not to mention the fame he had among the stompers and the bubblerazz generation. If things got really bad, he might be able to use his popularity back on Earth as a tool to get what he wanted. But he wasn’t ready to try that quite yet.

The others had gotten onto the expedition due to hard work, exhaustive training, and study. Trevor’s place on the Don Quijote was the result of luck.

After the catastrophe of the Agamemnon expedition, there had been a series of investigations and a sharp backlash against space. The public pressure to shut down the program meant that there was no possibility of paying for a launch with public funds.

But the ships for a second Mars expedition—the ships that would later be named Don Quijote and Dulcinea—had already been built. Dulcinea was already waiting, already on Mars; it had been launched to Mars at the same time as the Ulysses, a backup in case of a failure. And Don Quijote was all but finished and ready for launch.

The result had been a compromise. The ship could be completed and outfitted for a second expedition, as long as no government money was used.

As a result, the Don Quijote expedition was an unusual mixture of high and low technology. The expensive one-of-a-kind payload of the Agamemnon expedition had not been duplicated. There would be no billion-dollar Mars airplane such as the fragile Butterfly that the Agamemnon had taken to Mars but never used. Instead, the rockhopper and dirt-rover vehicles had been designed and donated by Mitsubishi America and by Mercedes-Ford. But even with such donations from around the world, the expedition needed almost four billion dollars in hard currency to launch.

Thailand, the economic giant of Asia ever since the collapse of the Chinese government in 2011, had contributed a billion dollars in exchange for their participation. Brazil, poorer but still ambitious, had contributed an equal amount. The remaining money had come from a lottery.

One crew slot on the expedition was allocated for the winner of the lottery. Anybody could enter. If they were over twenty-one and under sixty, could pass the Class IV pilot’s physical, and could make it all the way through the training process, the grand prize winner would get to be picked to go on the mission.

A ticket in the lottery cost one thousand dollars. Nearly two million tickets had been sold. Trevor Whitman and his little brother Brandon had each bought thirty.

The winner of the lottery had been a fifty-seven-year-old woman from Long Island. She had been given a ticket as an anniversary gift by her grandchildren. When she was told that the prize was not transferable, and she couldn’t let her son take her place on the expedition, she chose to take the ten-million-dollar second-place prize instead. “Goodness,” she had said. “It’s quite an honor, and I’m sure that it would be a lot of fun, but two years away from my home and my family? I couldn’t possibly.”

The second drawing picked a personal-injury lawyer in Cincinnati. He failed to pass the physical: He was overweight and had a minor heart arrhythmia, either of which factors would have precluded him from flying. He was given another ten-million-dollar consolation prize, and a third drawing was held.

The winner of the third drawing was an adolescent from Scottsdale, Arizona, named Trevor Whitman. Over the course of an hour, he went from being an obscure rich kid to being the most famous boy in the world.

If there was any person who seemed born for the expedition, it was Trevor Whitman. He was an Eagle scout, an adept horseman, skilled in rock climbing, and an amateur musician. More important, he was in perfect health. Despite this, though, through the whole training sequence he had felt that the rest of the crew viewed him as not really qualified for the mission—an impostor. None of the other crew members said anything of the sort, of course, but he knew what they must be thinking it. Every time he screwed up a suit check, or crashed the ship in one of the emergency scenarios that they practiced continuously (not that they would ever let him fly the ship, even in an emergency)—whenever he failed a task, he could imagine them watching him, judging. He was an impostor. They were waiting for—even expecting—him to tail.

It made him nervous, and being nervous made him screw up even more. There was nothing he could do about it.

23 In Training

Why are we so interested in going to Mars?” the lecturer had asked. He was a tall man with a potbelly and a huge black beard who waved his hands around as if he were washing invisible windows with his thumbs. He talked as if he were trying to keep up with thoughts that raced faster than he could speak; sometimes he tried to go too fast, and his words jumbled and stuck like cars in a traffic jam.

“Because it’s stomping cool,” Trevor answered.

“Right!” the lecturer said. “Right, right right! It’s way cool. But just why is it way cool?”

“Giant volcanoes,” Angie Kovalcik said. Angie was Trevor’s backup. She had won the second-place drawing. If Trevor screwed up, got sick, or for some reason was washed out of the mission, she would take his place. She was a forty-year-old housewife from New Jersey, the wife of a dentist, and in Trevor’s opinion had no right to even be considered for the mission. But when she had been told—on international television—that the second-place winner in the lottery could chose to train as a backup for the mission instead of taking the two-million-dollar second-place consolation prize, she’d said yes without even a heartbeat’s worth of hesitation.

She worked out in the gym for an hour and a half each day, and her dedication and physical shape made Trevor look like a slacker. Worse, everybody liked her. She had a knack for getting along with people, a skill that Trevor had never quite learned, and her two teenaged boys—cheering, “Go, mom, go!”—played well on television, getting almost as much air time as Trevor himself did.

Trevor hated her.

She was a constant threat at his back, seeming to whisper to him that if there’s anything wrong, if they find out that you’re not qualified, if you screw up…He knew that if they ever found out his secret, they would boot him off the team, and it was eating him away to be constantly reminded that he had a rival who would slide into his place in an instant.

Even worse, she honestly seemed to like him. She was constantly smiling, giving him advice and asking him for his, even baking cookies and acting as though she were his mom. Didn’t she realize that they were worst enemies?

They were in Houston, training, taking a crash course that was meant to bring them up to date on everything known about Mars. The instructor who was drilling them right now, Alexander Volynskji, was a biologist or a geologist or something. They were in a large lecture hall at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, although Trevor and Angie were his only two students.

“Volcanoes, sure,” he said, waving his hands dismissively. “Sure, everybody loves volcanoes. But we’re not going to Mars to look for volcanoes. Why are we going? One word: life!”

“But there is no life on Mars,” Trevor said.

“No life on Mars?” The lecturer looked at Trevor as if he were a second grader who had just confidently stated that the sun revolved around the Earth. Then he seemed to change his mind, bobbing his head and then shrugging. “Well, okay. Certainly that’s what most scientists think. I guess I’m just a heretic, an old-fashioned Percival Lowell who just refuses to see the evidence.

“But answer me this, young man. We know that life started on Earth damn near just as soon as the crust had cooled down enough to allow liquid water to pool. Now, we know that Mars was once a warmer and wetter planet. Sure, it’s a cold dry desert now, but it once had liquid water, maybe even oceans. So why shouldn’t we think that it once had life?”

“So you’re saying that we will be looking for fossils?” Angie said.

I will be looking for fossils, Trevor corrected, not we. But he kept that to himself.

“Well, sure,” Volynskji said. “Absolutely, no question, certainly. Look for fossils, yes indeed. But that’s not all you should keep your eyes out for. Look, what do we know about life on Earth? We know it’s tenacious. It lives in hot springs, at bottoms of glaciers, even on the insides of rocks. Every possible niche, what do you find? You find life.

“If there was ever life on Mars—and I tell you there was, there had to have been!—If there was life, I say it is still there. Life is tenacious. Once it got a toehold, it’s going to survive, it is going to adapt and evolve and find a way to hold on.

“Mars is dead? Sure, sure, that’s the conventional wisdom. But I, Alexander Volynskji, tell you, don’t be so sure. Maybe the robot probes couldn’t find life. But don’t close your eyes.

“Somewhere, maybe in hot springs hidden away deep inside caverns, maybe inside some volcanic crevice, maybe buried beneath the surface—somewhere, there will be life.

“Now, let me tell you about a rock from Antarctica…”

24 Problems

There were too many problems with his plan. Ryan started to write them down on a sheet of paper.

One, he wrote. We don’t know if Jesus do Sul even still works.

Two. It could save only three of the crew.

The Brazilian expedition had only sent two astronauts, and their return ship had not been designed with any thought of carrying a five-person crew. If they left out the Martian rocks and ice samples that the Brazilian expedition would have carried back, Ryan calculated, they would be able to easily get three of them onto the ship. But not, by any calculation, five.

He thought for a moment, then scratched it off his list. The others hadn’t been forced to face it yet, but Ryan knew that every one of them would die if they tried to stay here. Saving three of them was a step forward, not a drawback. He looked up to make sure that nobody was watching him, then went over it and obliterated the note he had written with heavy black lines until it was completely illegible. The Jesus do Sul was their only chance, and if they could only save three, it would be best to just not mention that fact until they actually made it to the pole. If they got to the pole.

Two, he wrote. Valles Marineris.

The enormous Valles Marineris stretched like a huge barrier across their path. They would have to cross it to get to the northern hemisphere. But the key to the expedition would be the rockhopper, the six-wheeled, pressurized Mars rover, and how would they carry the rockhopper up and down a vertical cliff two miles high?

They’d have to deal with it somehow.

Three, he wrote. Can we carry enough consumables?

Oxygen would come from the zirconia cells in their suits and the larger zirconia electrolyzer built into the rockhopper; as long as they had power, they would be able to break down carbon dioxide for oxygen to breathe. But what if they malfed? Could they carry enough spare parts? Could they carry enough food?

Four, he wrote, Breakdowns. The rock hopper would eventually break down; it had an expected time before failure of only one thousand kilometers. When it failed—

Five, he wrote. Not enough range.

That was the killer problem: simple distance. Ryan Martin plotted it, and came up short. They didn’t have enough range. He replotted, and even with more optimistic assumptions, there was simply no way that they could make it to the north pole. They just didn’t have the range. It was just impossible.

He leaned back and rubbed his eyes to think. There was only one other place on Mars that humans had been. Acidalia.

The landing site of the ill-fated second expedition to Mars.

Painstakingly, Ryan began to plot the path to Acidalia.

25 Indecisive Decisions

It was a wild idea, and John Radkowski distrusted wild ideas. A desperate journey to the pole, on an unlikely chance that they could salvage the Brazilian ship? Ryan Martin was a danger. He was too young, and had too strong a tendency to go off on a wild idea without paying attention to caution.

The cautious thing to do would be to stay right where they were.

But they would die.

They would probably die if they headed to the pole.

It was an impossible dilemma. John Radkowski didn’t like dilemmas. For every problem, he had always believed, there was one right solution. But this problem didn’t seem to have a right solution.

Radkowski still wondered if it had been some error of Ryan’s that had killed Chamlong. He would have to hold Ryan Martin back. It might be tough; Ryan had a great feel for machines but no common sense.

With his right hand, John Radkowski rubbed the place where three fingers were missing on his left hand. He often did this when he was uncertain or worried; he didn’t even notice that he was doing it. Caressing the rough scar tissue gave him a sort of tactile comfort: Whatever came, he could survive it.

The crew was looking to him for guidance, but he didn’t have any better solutions to offer. He knew that of all the things that a commander could do, the decision that was always wrong was to be indecisive. Better to be wrong, and boldly wrong, than to dither over the right solution.

But that didn’t mean to act without learning the facts. “Check the maps and orbital photographs, and give me a briefing in two days,” he’d told Martin.

But now the two days were over, and he was no closer to an idea of what to do than when he’d started.

They would die if they stayed.

There really wasn’t a choice. Desperate and stupid as the idea was, it was their only chance. They had to go.

He let nothing of his feelings show when he called the crew together.

“Engineer Martin has explained his plan to you,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that it’s going to be easy; it’s not. It’s a tough haul, and it’s not clear whether it’s even possible at all.

“You have discussed it among yourselves. Ryan has come up with some refinements of his plan, but before we go any further, I want to hear from you. All I want from you is one single word. Do we accept his plan or not? Yes or no.

“Martin, we know your opinion. Doctor Jackson?”

Tana nodded.

“Say it,” Radkowski said.

“It’s our only chance.”

“I take that for yes. Ms. Conselheiro?”

Her eyes were shadowed. “We die here. I don’t like that choice.”

“Your vote?”

“I vote to live.”

“Mr. Whitman?”

“I haven’t heard any better of a choice, have you? Hell, let’s stomp.”

Radkowski nodded. The decision was made, and they had bought into it. He didn’t even have to vote himself.

Under the circumstances, that was the best he could hope for.

“Then it’s decided,” he said. “Get yourselves ready. We leave tomorrow at first light.”

26 Africa

There is a visceral feeling to piloting a jet fighter that can never quite be described. It is a feeling of power and of control, of riding a bestial strength tamed just barely enough to respond with fury to your least suggestion of stick pressure. John Radkowski would never admit it, but if there had ever been a choice between the two, he would rather fly than have sex. In its way, piloting the F-22 fighter was better than sex.

Two years at the Eastthorpe Military Academy, paid for by his brother’s drug dealing, and four years of ROTC at New York University had changed Johnny Radkowski. He was no longer the rebellious punk from the projects. He had learned caution and discipline. His classmates admired him, but none of them were particularly close to him.

He’s got the killer instinct, his Air Force flight instructor wrote in his recommendation for him to move on to train on fighters. He was not, in actual point of fact, a spectacularly good pilot; he was more than competent, but he would never reach that mystic fusion of the machine with his own nervous system, the unity with the machine that marks the very best pilots. But what he lacked in finesse, he made up for in sheer determination. The kid has guts, his flight instructor wrote.

So John Radkowski, bad boy from the bad side of Queens, became a fighter pilot. A year later he was flying fighter escort for the relief missions in Africa.

It was a stupid, dirty little war, or rather, a tangled matrix of wars, all linked together in hard-to-understand ways. Nobody in the fighter corps really knew what they were fighting for, or why.

“We’re talking a mix of colonialism, neocolonialism, tribalism, religious conflicts, foreign troops, modern weapons, economic decline, political aspirations, international debts, racism, nationalism and pan-nationalism,” the briefing officer had told them, before they had first shipped out for Africa.

He was reading from a list that had been prepared in a book. “Don’t even try to understand it. We’ve got a job to do, and we’re going to do the best we can.”

That evening he had been flying escort for a bomber. Columns of greasy black smoke rose from burning rebel camps like signal fires to reticulate the African sky. However many camps, or purported camps, they had bombed, there were always more.

The African unification wars were going badly for all sides.

He had been enjoying the flying, coming back from a run over territory that had been cleared as friendly. He was not paying any attention to anything in particular when an antique Russian heatseeking SAM leaped away from a crag below and homed in on his wingman. He cued his mike. “Bravo, Alpha, looks like you’ve picked up a hitchhiker.”

A laconic reply. “I got him.” The jet next to him hit afterburners and rocketed upward, trailing flame. The missile, outclassed, fell away and then curved off to crash somewhere distant in the African twilight.

By luck, Radkowski had been looking in the right direction and had gotten a good fix on the hilltop the missile had come from. He made a wide turn and came back around and down, holding close to the treetops and then pulling up into position to rake the mountaintop with cannon fire. He cued his mike. “I’m gonna teach the bastards a brief lesson,” he said.

“Teach ’em good, Radko,” his wingman replied.

Only at the last minute did he see the face in his sights, a boy who could not have been any older than nine, frightened and alone, the empty missile launcher discarded at his feet. And then his cannon fire blew apart the hilltop, and the face disappeared into smoke and rock dust.

The face continued to haunt his nights for years.

After that night, he put in a transfer to fly evacuation transports. It was a lower prestige job, and the word that spread in the fighter squadron was that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody said that to his face, though.

Flying evacuation was better. He could at least pretend that he was helping people, ferrying endless planeloads of refugees, pencil-thin and nearly naked, each one carrying all of their belongings held wrapped up in a cloth or in a molded plastic basket balanced precariously on his head. The refugee camps outside Bangalore were not paradise, but they were better than the war zone. He could tell himself that he was saving lives.

It was no safer than flying fighters, and already he had been hit twice. The first one was a lucky rifle shot from the ground that had penetrated the transport’s sheet-metal skin right between his feet and ricocheted around the cabin. It had shattered the glass on his instruments, but done no actual damage. The second hit was from a surface-to-air missile that had detonated close enough to rip his right aileron to shreds. Despite the loss of control, he had babied the transport down to a flawless landing right on the numbers at the Diego Garcia airfield. After that, with no injuries from either hit, his ground crew started called him by a new nickname: Lucky Radkowski.

The third time he was not so lucky. Taking advantage of heavy cloud cover to hide from watching satellites, the Splinter faction of the Unification Army had set up an antiaircraft battery on the coast, in the mistaken belief that the evacuation transports were French bombers supporting the rebel Ugandan Liberation Front. The evacuation fleet flew right over it. Stoddart, on his left, took a hit dead center. Ritchmann, on his right, took fire that ripped off his left wing, and fell, in pieces, to the beach. Radkowski’s luck still held. The first SAM hit took out his outboard left engine and half his fuel. The second took out both his right engines.

Leaking oil and fuel, there was no way he could make the base at Diego Garcia on his one remaining engine. He broke radio silence—little point in it, now. “November seven two niner to base, two niner to base. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. I’m hit.”

“Copy, November seven two niner. Can you make it as far as Mahajanga?”

“Will try.” He checked the charts, although he had memorized them long ago. Madagascar, if not friendly territory, at least was noncombatant.

He coaxed the damaged bird as far as he could, but even Madagascar turned out to be too much to hope. He ditched over open ocean.

The last thing he remembered, as the dark water came up like a fist to meet the airplane, was a fierce joy. It is over, he thought. My debt is paid. And then, immediately after, he remembered the refugees he was carrying, and thought, no! They have nobody. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, he thought, to keep thee in all thy ways.

And then the water hit, and the airplane broke apart and sank.

Later, they said he was a hero. They said that he saved half the refugees.

He had been clinging to a shred of floating wreckage for over five hours when the rescue helicopter pulled him out of the water, in shock, bleeding, and semiconscious from blood loss and exposure. A shark had bitten off half his hand, and then apparently found other food in the wreckage. He didn’t even remember it.

Post-traumatic amnesia, the medical examiners told him. Don’t worry about it. Maybe the memories would surface later.

Maybe they wouldn’t.

He had already been accepted into the astronaut corps. The evacuation had been his last mission in Africa.

27 Station T-r-e-v

Hello, Earth! Hello, stompers and rats and all the hominid life-forms on that big fuzzy ball we call home. This is Trevor Whitman, station T-R-E-V, your intrepid reporter, calling in from the pink planet, Mars.

“This is taped, but Commander Radkowski assures me that he’ll put it up to play to Earth over the low-gain antenna overnight, so you’ll be hearing this tomorrow, I guess. Anyway, tomorrow our time, that is!

“I’m sure you’re all watching our epic trek across the red desert back there. Mars is after us big time, but we’re not dead yet. I’m reporting in That we’ve got a tough goal of a hundred and fifty miles to cover on day one of our epic adventure, and we’re raring to get going.

“Uh, I guess Commander Radkowski has told you that we’re not going to be receiving your broadcasts once we start moving, so I won’t be answering mail this time. Something to do with the high-gain antenna back at the Don Quijote. I don’t know the technical stuff; I guess the commander told you all that stuff anyway, right? I have to admit here that I guess I sort of slept through some of the lectures about communications links and bandwidth and all that techno stuff. Anyway, I’m not receiving right now, but just keep those questions coming, right, and I guess they’ll forward them on to me when we get the communications from Earth back up.

“Uh, it’s been a great trip so far—I can tell you that for certain, once we get moving we are going to be seeing more of Mars than any other humans in history. I mean, that’s going to be some kind of record. It’s real big, there’s a lot of Mars to see, and they tell me just wait, it gets better.

“So stay tuned, okay? Don’t forget about us up here.

“So this is Trevor Whitman, your main man on Mars, signing off.

“Bye, Earth!

“Okay, that’s it. Okay, Earth? Mission control? Is there a mission control out there? Okay, don’t broadcast this part, okay? Look, things out here aren’t real good. I don’t know, but I think we’re in trouble. We need a rescue ship here, okay? Look, the commander tells me that it’s impossible, there isn’t enough time, but don’t listen to him, okay? Just send a rescue ship. We need a rescue ship. I don’t believe it when he says you won’t do it. Look, we’re going to die up here, and that’s going to be, like, major bad publicity, and you can count on that. Big-time bad publicity. So send help.

“Send help.

“Help.

“Please?”