“One.”
I thought about Izzy. My beautiful Izzy. Smart and gorgeous and funny and sweet and sexy and kind and . . .
“We have ignition.”
PART THREE
RED PLANET
I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.
—Captain Cook
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
—Walt Whitman
Chapter 51
* * *
The whole launch thing? It’s not what you’d expect. And it’s not like they show it in the movies. We had the same cold sweats Mom must have had when she was sitting on a highly explosive rocket. But really, once you’re strapped in you have to sit there for a couple of hours. It actually gets boring. The other kids were on the other rockets. Dad seemed to have zoned out and was off in his own head, probably thinking about seeing Mom again. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that one’s parents are an actual couple, with all of the emotions, drama, needs, and eccentricities that go with that. Realizing that made me feel a different kind of kinship with Dad. A guy-to-guy thing. At the same time I didn’t want to disturb what was going on in his head.
The other adults around me were talking to each other, except for those who’d dozed off. Seriously. The ones who’d been out in space a few times thought this part of it was like watching paint dry, so they nodded off.
It seemed to take forever and it gave me way too much time to think of all the things that could go wrong in this kind of thing. Being a mechanical engineer was not a plus in such moments because my whole life had been about focusing on what could go wrong.
Waiting for ignition was the long part but the actual time from when we lifted off until we reached orbit was only eight and a half minutes.
That’s it.
We shot away from the ground by burning 1.6 million pounds of solid fuel in two minutes.
What keeps you entertained is the gravitation force. G-force. During the launch we hit 3.5 g. That’s three and a half times the gravitational pull of Earth. That kind of force slams you back and tries to pull all the flesh from your bones as the rocket continues to accelerate. It gets harder to breathe with each second until you think you can’t do it.
Nine minutes in you’re cruising at an orbital velocity of 17,500 miles an hour. That’s twenty-three times the speed of sound.
Which was about when my heart started beating again. At least that’s how it felt. Not sure I breathed much on the way up either.
Chapter 52
* * *
“Mind some company?”
I looked up to see Nirti hovering there. In microgravity you don’t have the sound of footsteps to warn you. Like me she’d changed out of the bulky space suit and into a thinner pressure suit designed for maximum mobility that also helped with blood pressure, respiration, and other functions. They were very useful, we’d been told, for newbies in space. Every time you go up it takes some getting used to. And soon the weird parts of micro-g would be normal for us and we’d switch to wearing sweatpants and T-shirts. Right now, though, the snug fit of the pressure suit was comforting.
“Sure,” I said, nodding to the cramped space beside me. “Have a seat. Or whatever.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
She used the little knobbed handholds that covered most of the walls, ceiling, and floor to steer herself into the nook where I was crammed. It was one of several “contemplating ports,” which was a fancy way of saying “window.” The ports were comfortable enough for one person to sit but tight when Nirti squirmed in beside me. We had to hold on to the same no-float straps to keep us in place.
Outside the window was Earth. It filled two-thirds of the port and looked amazing. Mostly blue, with patches of green and brown and swirls of white. Half of the world was in darkness and we could see the glitter of millions of lights.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. Maybe half an hour. We were both caught up in what was happening to us. To where we were. We sat together and watched Earth turn. We saw it through the struts and cables that formed part of the Lucky Eight. Astronauts in space suits moved around like slow snowmen. I understood most of what they were doing because it was stuff my mom did, which means she’d taught me a lot about it. I could do an EVA in a full EMU to fix nearly anything on the ship. I spent five weeks working with her team to disassemble and reassemble a full-scale mockup of the front part of a transit vehicle. I could make basic repairs in my sleep. And I almost said all this to Nirti. As a way of breaking the silence, or to make small talk, or to impress her.
I didn’t, though. It was Nirti who finally broke the silence. She reached out and tapped the triple-pane glass.
“Look,” she said.
“What?” I asked, distracted, looking more inward than out.
“Isn’t that your mom?”
I snapped back to focus and looked where she was pointing. One of the astronauts working outside was smaller than the others, moved less clumsily, and had red trim on her white space suit. I couldn’t see her face through the gold visor, but Nirti was right.
“Mom . . . ,” I said, placing my fingers on the glass.
I could feel Nirti looking at me, but she didn’t say anything. It was another long time before we spoke again.
Chapter 53
* * *
It’s not like we didn’t get to have some fun. All four of us, in EMUs, doing EVA drills. Sounds like work? Sure, but we were a couple hundred miles above the planet, in space suits, in space. You want to try and tell me that’s not a rush?
It wasn’t all fun, though. We had a real nail-biter of an exercise. Something happened that could have ended the whole mission.
It started with the four of us—Luther, Nirti, Zoé, and I—working with an old NASA geezer Fast Jack Turner and his grandson. It was the last chance to test us and make sure we had, as Fast Jack constantly said, “the Right Stuff.” That’s a reference to an old movie about the early days of the space program. He made us watch it for homework, though mostly I think it was so we would get his joke.
Anyway, we were working our way along the inner rim of the B-launch corridor, which was the fancy name for the slot where the Muninn was sitting. The Huginn was in the A-launcher. The NASA guy was drilling us on buddy-coupling, an exercise where two astronauts hook onto one tether instead of having separate lines. It was part of the worst-case-scenario exercises Fast Jack liked to run.
“We’re not even going to have to do an EVA,” complained Zoé. “Not until we reach Mars, and that has gravity.”
“He will,” said Fast Jack, pointing at me as we all floated in a cluster with Earth spinning below us. “If I know Jean Hart, she’ll have young Tristan crawling all over the Huginn like a tick on a swollen vein.”
“Eww,” said Nirti.
“He’s not joking,” I said. “Mom loves inspections. That way she knows everything’s working right.”
Luther snorted something. Through the helmet radios it sounded like feedback.
“Okay, campers,” said the old man, “here’s the drill. Luther, you and Nirti are going to go up there and hook on. Zoé, you and the mechanic stay on deck until I give the go order, and then you make your way up there at top speed. You do not go into free fall. You don’t unhook until you’ve hooked onto the next section of the structure, capiche?”
“Sure,” I said, and the others nodded.
“I can’t hear you,” roared Fast Jack. “Did you hear me or are all of your radios malfunctioning?”
“Yes, sir,” we yelled.
“Good. Now I’ll be timing you, and my grandson will be chasing you up. First person he tags cleans the crew toilets on the Lucky Eight.”
“Oh, gross,” said Zoé.
“You don’t like it, don’t get caught,” said Fast Jack. “Simple as that.”
His grandson, Little Jack—who was roughly the size of Mount Rushmore—said nothing. No
t really sure if I ever heard him speak a single word. One of those guys who looked like a bridge troll but had less personality. He could spacewalk like nobody’s business, though. Bulk doesn’t matter much in microgravity, but raw strength does. And experience. He’d grown up in the space program and he had an incredible role model to follow.
Luther and Nirti began to climb, mindful to follow all of the safety precautions. As soon as they were at the top of the wheel, Fast Jack tapped Nirti and me on the arms.
“Clock starts now. Haul it, kids!”
We hauled it.
But we were barely halfway to the top when we heard the old astronaut say to his grandson, “Sic ’em.”
Nirti turned to look down, but I grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t. It’ll slow you down. Climb!”
Actually, looking back would also scare her. Even though this was a drill, Little Jack looked like a space monster. I’d seen him do this drill with some of the adults. He pounced, and—unlike us—he sometimes did it without a tether. It was an insane risk. I think he might have been a little crazy.
“Move,” I growled as Nirti and I went up. From a distance it probably looked like the world’s slowest chase because everything looks slower in space. Not really how it felt, though. Everything felt speeded up.
I reached up for the next bar in the structure, hooked on with one hand, unhooked with the other, push-pulling myself up. Repeated. Over and over again. Climbing fast, sometimes pulling Nirti to help her keep up. She was tiny and didn’t have my reach. Couple of times I pretty much threw her upward.
I didn’t look back. I knew Little Jack was gaining.
There’s no sound in space but there is inside a space suit. Huffing and gasping, the rasp of my own breath, and, I swear, the hammering of my heart. Nirti’s grunts of effort and cries of alarm. This didn’t feel like a drill. It felt like an actual chase.
Through the internal suit noise I could hear Zoé over the radio calling encouragement and Luther laughing at us, telling us how slow we were. Telling us we were going to be cleaning toilets all the way to Mars. He promised to eat as many beans and red peppers as he could find.
Then it was there. The top bar, right above me. One last hook, one last pull.
And I heard Nirti scream.
I spun around, expecting to see her floating away, her line unhooked, so I was reaching for my hook, ready to do something stupid.
But she hadn’t fallen off the Lucky Eight.
Little Jack had caught her.
Zoé slid down past me and hooked on next to Nirti, trying to put herself between the smaller girl and the big astronaut. Luther kept laughing. Then Little Jack leaned back and pointed up at him.
“You’re next,” he said.
That didn’t stop Luther from laughing. Not for a second. He even reached down to pull Little Jack up to the top bar.
“Any time you’re ready,” said Luther, and even though I couldn’t see his face through the faceplate, I could feel that nasty, stupid grin of his. “Or do you want to rest up for a bit?”
Little Jack didn’t answer. Instead he pointed the way he’d come. Way down at the bottom of the wheel, Fast Jack waited.
Luther laughed again and, without waiting for Zoé, flung himself over the edge. Little Jack let them get more than halfway down before he went after them. Damn he was fast. You’d think there was gravity pulling him, that’s how quickly he moved, slapping at the poles to steer his body, ignoring all the hooks, moving like a shark going after a bleeding swimmer. It was scary.
He reached for Luther, and missed. But he caught Zoé.
The timer on the inside of my helmet gave me the numbers. He’d caught Zoé fast, but he’d nabbed Nirti faster. Luther’s time reaching the bottom was three seconds faster than my time coming up.
Luther never stopped laughing.
Chapter 54
* * *
Later that night I found Nirti in the head, her feet braced to give her leverage, a rag wrapped around her mouth and nose, scrubbing at the fittings on the toilets. Don’t ask how in the universe a bunch of astronauts can make a zero-gravity toilet that messy, but it was toxic. I guess most of the mess was our people and some random technical fault. They weren’t as skilled at pooping and peeing without gravity, and the air-suction sanitation system never worked as well in practice as it did when they trained us on it. Ask anyone.
This nasty-ass job was usually assigned to the least trained members of the team, called “general techs” as opposed to “mission specialists.” We had a couple of them on each ship, but when someone screwed up and earned a “penalty” job, the GTs were allowed to go off shift. Nirti was doing penalty work because of what happened outside.
Nirti’s eyes were red, maybe from the smell or maybe from the humiliation of it. She’d been at it for over an hour. She glanced sharply at me.
“Did you come to make fun of me too?” she demanded in a voice that was maybe one degree above absolute zero.
“What?”
“Luther was already here. He used the stall next to me while I was working. It’s disgusting.”
A glob of tear had begun forming around her eye but she was wearing soiled gloves.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
She was angry but she did it, and I gently wiped the globule away. It floated past me and into the corridor. Then, before she had a chance to open her eyes I took the scrub brush out of her hand.
“What are you doing?” she snapped.
I smiled and used my shoulder to nudge her out of the way, then I jammed one foot against the door frame and began working, picking up where she left off. I didn’t say a word.
Neither did she. Instead she opened the next stall, grabbed another brush from the rack, and set to work.
Luther came by half an hour later, but if he had to use the can again, he changed his mind and held it in. He hovered there, watching Nirti and me work. He was there for maybe two whole minutes before he vanished, silent as a ghost.
Chapter 55
* * *
You know what felt weird? Not having a cell phone anymore. We left ours behind on Earth because they didn’t work up here. But . . . we had tablets that connected with satellites, so we could use things like Skype, Spreecast, and Google Hangouts. We signed away most of our privacy when we joined Mars One. The corporate sponsors and cable TV networks could access our communications devices. So could the Mars One security team. Not everything, mind you, because even astronauts need some privacy. I missed being able to text Herc and Izzy.
But I had something else weighing on me. We’d been at Lucky Eight for almost two days, but Mom hadn’t tried to find me. Or find Dad. Kind of sucked. I could see her floating around, and I heard about her from the assembly and mission support staff. That was it.
“It makes sense,” said Zoé when I mentioned it to her. “In a way.”
“In what way exactly?” I asked, instantly irritated.
She flushed and recoiled a little at my tone, but when she realized I was frustrated at the situation and not angry with her, she explained. “Once the launch starts you and your folks are going to be together all the time. You won’t be able to get away from them even if you need space. She’s logical so she’ll know that. She’ll know that she can take this time to concentrate one hundred percent on making sure all the technical elements are perfect. She’s in a very specific mind-set right now, and she doesn’t want to risk breaking.”
“Not even to see her son?” asked Nirti, appalled.
“Especially that,” said Zoé. “But it’s not as cruel as it sounds. Right now her entire world is the safety and integrity of the machines that are going to keep everyone—including her son—safe and alive. Any time she takes away from that makes her doubt that safety. It would eat at her. This way she can feel confident about the transit vehicles and all of their systems. If you look at it that way, what she’s doing is right.”
“It’s cold,” said Nirti, shaking her head.
Chapter 56
* * *
Night before the launch.
Luther was on the bunk below me. “Hey, lawn mower repairman . . . you awake?”
“Ugh. I am now. What’s your problem?” I was strapped into my bunk to keep from floating away in microgravity, and I’d finally dozed off. Getting to sleep had been tough enough and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it again. Sleeping in space was weird. The beds were really shelves with sleeping bags attached to them. Each bag had armholes, so you stuck your arms through and reached outside to tighten the Velcro straps. We looked like bug cocoons. And you had to strap your head to the pillow, which was even less comfortable than it sounds. The pillows were only pieces of foam. If you didn’t pull your arms back inside the bag they’d just float around. I woke up once and saw something about to hit me and freaked, but it was my own drifting hand.
“I can’t sleep,” complained Luther.
“Oh, that’s a shame. No . . . wait, I don’t give a crap.”
“Can you sleep?”
“Not with you whining like a sissy.”
I heard him undo one of the Velcro straps and then he punched the bottom of my bunk. Not to hurt, just to make a point. I was thinking of something nasty to say, sorting through some of Herc’s best insults, when Luther asked a question.
“Are you scared, Tristan?”
I almost responded with an insult. Almost.
Didn’t, though.
“No,” I said.
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