Mars One

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Anything can break down,” said Zoé, but she sounded uncertain.

  “My dad says that it’s all because the equipment isn’t maintained right,” said Luther, and then he realized what he was saying and stumbled to a halt. He muttered something in Zulu that I’m sure was directed at himself and was probably deeply obscene. Moments of self-realization can be nasty.

  Zoé frowned at me. “You’re serious, Tris? You actually think someone is trying to sabotage this ship?”

  “No,” I said. “Not someone. Not one person. I think there are at least two of them. Someone on this ship who set the fire and someone on the Muninn who sabotaged the water and the life support.”

  Nirti said, “If it wasn’t for Tristan’s mother, everyone on the Muninn would be dead.”

  “But . . . but . . . sabotage?” protested Luther. He looked to Zoé for help, but she nodded.

  “It’s the only logical answer, Luther. Someone’s trying to kill all of us. Someone’s trying to stop us from getting to Mars.”

  And that was when the alarm bells went off.

  Again.

  Chapter 94

  * * *

  But it wasn’t another disaster. Instead Director Colpeys called us all into the common room to show us a video.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Tony as we hurried in.

  He pointed to Colpeys, who was adjusting the settings on the big monitor. “Something just came in from Earth.”

  Before I could ask anything else, the face of Dr. Ilse Aukes filled the screen.

  “Hello to you all,” she said, her face grave and her tone very formal. “You are a long way from home but your journey will be over soon. I am gratified to hear that the crew of the Muninn is doing well and everyone is expected to make a full recovery. We were all very concerned, as was everyone here on Earth. Our thoughts are always with you.”

  We waited, knowing that this assembly could not have been called just for that.

  Dr. Aukes took a breath. “One hour ago we received a message sent in confidence from the Chinese government. That message has also been shared with a select few space programs, including SpaceX and NASA. I will read to you a translation of that message.” She glanced at the camera as if she could see us in real time. Maybe she was trying to decide how we would react to what she was about to say.

  Nirti took my hand and squeezed it, and her fingers were like ice. “Oh God,” she breathed, “they’re dead. That’s what this is going to be. They’re all dead.”

  I held on to her hand.

  Dr. Aukes read the message. “ ‘Late last night our satellites were able to get their first good angle on the Golden Dragon. We have been able to confirm that the capsule is still attached and that no one has left the ship to descend to the surface of Mars.

  “ ‘However we have made a discovery,’ ” continued Dr. Aukes, still reading the note. “ ‘While we do not yet know what happened to cause the Dragon to fail, or what prevented our astronauts from reaching the Martian surface, we know that at some point one or more of the crew accomplished a successful EVA.’ ”

  We all waited, frozen where we clung or hovered.

  The image on the screen changed as Dr. Aukes’s face vanished to be replaced with a grainy, dark, badly lit satellite image. It showed the side of the Golden Dragon. Someone had gone outside the ship and attached a long piece of cloth to the outside, fastening it to handholds. Two words were written on it. In Chinese. In French. In Italian. And in a dozen other languages.

  Including English.

  “We don’t know how long ago this was done,” said Dr. Aukes, “and we don’t know if it’s still true. But it is a glimmer of hope. The Chinese expressed concern that the crew has not performed any additional EVAs, as far as they know, which suggests that there was additional damage, either to their suits or to the airlock. Or both. The real point, though, is what they accomplished with the spacewalk they were able to make.”

  Those two words changed the shape of the world.

  They said, ALIVE INSIDE.

  Chapter 95

  * * *

  “We have to save them!” cried Nirti. She was the first one to break the stunned silence that followed Dr. Aukes’s message.

  A few of the crew echoed Nirti, but most didn’t. What happened was a very loud nineteen-way argument. Everyone began yelling their opinion, their reaction, the pros, the cons.

  “We have no idea how old that message is,” said Mr. De Jaeger, and that became a big point. He was right, too. By the time we reached Mars it would be more than three years since the Chinese ship left Earth and almost two years since they reached Mars’s orbit. There wasn’t enough food for that many people for that long a time.

  As the adults’ voices rose louder and louder, Nirti and I drifted to the edge of the crowd. After a moment Luther and Zoé joined us.

  “We have to rescue them,” said Nirti. “That’s the bottom line.”

  “And kill ourselves trying?” countered Luther.

  “We won’t kill ourselves. Dr. Hart got over to the Muninn okay. We were able to get both ships together.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “So, what? We just leave them to die?” Nirti yelled, then immediately dropped her voice. A couple of the adults glanced at us, then went back to their own frenzied conversations.

  “I’m not saying I don’t want to rescue the Chinese,” said Luther, his voice low but urgent, “but we don’t even know if they’re still alive in there. I mean . . . look at the risk-reward thing. We could burn a lot of fuel and take all sorts of risks to get over there, and what if we find a ship full of dead people?”

  “What if there are still survivors?” I asked. “How would you feel if we did nothing and they died?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say I like it, but we have to be practical. We need to use our resources we have to keep us alive. The Muninn’s a mess and bad things are happening here on the Huginn. We’d have to be crazy to go looking for more trouble.”

  Zoé shook her head. “We could do it, I think. It’s not impossible.”

  “There’s too much risk, though,” Luther insisted. “Shouldn’t we be smart and fix the problems at hand before we make it worse?”

  “Why can’t we do both?” asked Nirti.

  “It’s dangerous.” Luther’s voice was rising now and we all shushed him.

  “Dangerous?” I said. “So is going to live on another planet. Come on, man, we’re supposed to be intrepid explorers and colonists. Everything they’ve trained us for since we joined Mars One was about doing a bunch of things at once. We’re the ultimate multitaskers.”

  He shook his head stubbornly. “All of the risks we’re taking on this mission have been thought through. We have safety margins. Going outside of the mission is nuts. How could we possibly justify it?”

  Nirti said, “What if the Chinese were sabotaged like we were? If anyone’s still alive over there they might know who did it and why. That could help us figure out who’s doing it to us here.”

  Luther considered but still didn’t like it. “That’s thin. It’s not enough of a reason.”

  “How about basic humanity?” I asked. “We’re all trying to establish human life and civilization on Mars. Everything we do is going to be part of history. It’s going to be part of our legacy.”

  “Legacy?” he said, almost amused by the word.

  “Yes. What we do now is how we’re going to be remembered. Saving other people while dealing with personal dangers. Tell me you haven’t read about that kind of thing in history books before. Come on, Luther, you’ve been saying all along that you want to be the first person on Mars. How about being the first hero on Mars?”

  He smiled. “Oh, man . . . that’s corny even for you.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but am I wrong?”

  I could tell that, corny as it was, I’d scored a point on him. Even so, he wasn’t sold. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “The Golden Dragon is orbi
ting too far out from Mars. If we rendezvoused with it we’d be at the wrong altitude for our landing vehicles to make their descent.”

  “We could course correct after,” I said. “We still have some fuel.”

  “Sorry, Tristan,” Luther said, “but we used up a lot of that fuel with your mother’s scheme.”

  “My mother’s ‘scheme’?” I echoed. “You mean saving everyone aboard the Muninn? Yeah, I can see how that was a complete waste of time.”

  He faltered. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?” I asked, moving closer to him, crowding his space.

  He bristled immediately and puffed out his chest. “You want to do this again?”

  “Stop it,” snarled Nirti. Luther exhaled and looked away at the rest of the crew, who were all arguing as fiercely as us.

  Zoé touched Luther’s arm. “You’re wrong about the fuel. We ran all the numbers when Dr. Hart went over to the Muninn, and even taking into account the retro firing and the acceleration boosts, we’re still going to reach Mars with extra fuel. Not a lot, but enough. And none of the sabotage has hurt the engines or fuel tanks.”

  “But—” began Luther, but she cut him off.

  “We have enough,” she repeated. “That was always the plan, don’t forget. To make sure nothing would prevent us from getting here. The calculations are complicated and figuring it out will take a lot of time and resources . . . but we can do it.”

  We all looked at the adults, some of whom were yelling at each other. Everybody seemed to be speaking at once and no one was looking in our direction.

  Nirti nodded and said, “They’re not arguing about the fuel or about whether we should risk doing something with all that’s going on here. That’s not it at all.”

  “What, then?” asked Luther.

  Nirti’s eyes were filled with strange, sad lights. “I think they’re upset because the Golden Dragon is a Chinese ship.” When we stared blankly at her, she explained. “The Chinese government’s always been private and apart. They keep their politics and science mostly to themselves. The rest of the world’s been helping each other out. Even NASA and SpaceX have helped us, and we’re technically competitors. But China didn’t even tell anyone they were launching a ship. They hid their launch platforms. It was all secret. And, I guess, people resent it. I know my mom was really pissed at them when we all thought they were going to land people on Mars first. And, sick as it sounds to say it, I bet a lot of people—on Earth and on our ships—were glad when we heard that the Golden Dragon was lost. Or damaged . . . or whatever. People were glad—my own mother was glad—that something happened to them to keep that crew from beating us.” She shook her head very slowly. “How sick is that? We’re all ready to leave the crew to die because we don’t like what their government did? How is that a good thing? How is that something we can be proud of? There were all those speeches about mankind heading out into deep space for the benefit of all mankind. Does ‘all’ mean what it’s supposed to mean, or do we cut out the people we don’t like? What does that say about us? What does that say about who we’re willing to be?”

  Luther and I stared at her, unable to answer those questions. Zoé, however, wrapped her arms gently around Nirti and kissed her on both cheeks, then hugged her for a long time. I glanced over at Luther. He was chewing his lip and there were deep lines between his brows. He cut me a look too.

  “I’m still more freaked out about the sabotage than the Chinese,” Luther said. “I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Not saying I don’t want to help, but we can’t help them if we’re dead.”

  I looked past the crowd to the section of wall that was still scorched from the fire. One by one the others noticed me and realized what I was looking at.

  “Maybe we can do something about that,” I said.

  While the adults still argued, the four of us went back to the wheel. Gravity seemed appropriate for the weight of what we had to talk about.

  Chapter 96

  * * *

  Zoé looked up from what she was doing and laughed.

  “What?” I asked.

  The four of us were crowded into the workshop. It was the third day in a row we’d met there while Tony was busy doing other stuff. I’d rigged a tiny location tracker into the lining of his tool kit. It would let us know when he was heading back to the workshop. Simple stuff.

  The project Zoé was working on was key to what we were trying to prove. There were reality show cameras everywhere on the ship, but the sabotage still happened. Since no one on either ship had been arrested or confined or whatever it was we’d have to do when we caught someone, there had to be an explanation. Zoé found it by hacking into the digital files stored in the cameras. These were collected all day, then uploaded to the Laser Communications Relay System. Twice each day the LCRS sent bursts of data back to Earth. The current rate of transfer was 925 megabytes of data per second, which was really fast, but not when you were talking about video interviews from twenty people on each ship. That’s a lot of data.

  Zoé was trying to hack all the way into the bulk storage so we could see what—if anything—was on the cameras in the hours leading up to each major malfunction. It was harder than it sounds. Mars One did a lot to protect the data it sent back to Earth, but the TV networks were ten times more paranoid about that sort of thing. Weird, I know, but Mars One was a public nonprofit corporation and TV networks were multi-billion-dollar companies who had a thing about proprietary information. I bet the CIA and NSA could have learned some tricks about cyber security from them. Cracking that level of protection takes mad skills. Zoé, on the other hand, was Zoé.

  Even so, it took her a couple of long days, but she beat it. Then we had to watch those videos.

  I thought that part was going to involve hours of boring footage of people floating around the hab, but I was wrong. Zoé ran the feeds at high speed and sat there like a statue, her blue eyes ticking back and forth between two screens, watching everything. And seeing everything.

  “There!” she cried, and as we crowded around her she ran one feed back. The time code on the corner of the screen said that it was 04:16 a.m. on the morning of the fire here on the Huginn. The camera was in a fixed position and it showed a little more than half of the corridor. I touched the screen to indicate the panel, which was still undamaged.

  We watched the seconds click by and then the screen went blank. It wasn’t static or an interrupted signal because the time counter was still there in the corner of the screen. But the image had gone weird. Dark gray and textured.

  “Hey, what happened?” asked Luther.

  “Run it back,” I said, and we watched it again. Then Nirti suggested we watch it in slow motion. That’s when we saw what it was. There was the briefest flash of a hand, or part of a hand. Two fingers and the edge of a palm. The rest of the hand was covered by a piece of cloth. The hand reached above the camera and then all we could see was the cloth. It was almost completely opaque, allowing just enough light through so we could see some of the texture.

  We played it again just to be sure.

  We were sure.

  Someone had blocked the camera with cloth. It remained in place for eleven minutes, and then it was whipped away. Thirty-five minutes later smoke began leaking out through the seams between panels. We watched the heat buckle the corner of the panel and finally pop it open as denser smoke poured out.

  “Turn it off,” said Nirti, looking sick.

  Zoé hit the button and the screen went dark.

  “So,” said Luther heavily, “we know.”

  “We know,” I agreed. “But we don’t know who.”

  “We know enough to tell Director Colpeys,” said Zoé.

  “Maybe, but not enough to help him do anything about it.” I sucked a tooth for a moment while I thought it through. “Zoé, can you access the feeds from the Muninn?”

  She considered, shrugged, nodded. “Sure. It’ll take a couple of hours, but I can do it
.”

  “It’s going to be the same thing, isn’t it?” said Luther. “If there’s two of them, they’ll both be careful. The other guy will have blocked the camera too.”

  “Yeah . . . I guess. And I just thought of something else. I think we’re actually wasting our time with this.”

  Zoé bristled. “Why?”

  “Because the reality TV people already have these files. They’d have seen this stuff.”

  “No,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at this.” She pulled up one of the pages she’d been looking at earlier. It showed long lists of coded file names and corresponding numbers. “This is the transmission log from the LCRS system. The cameras belong to the reality show network, but the LCRS belongs to Mars One. Director Colpeys has the right to withhold any video files that he feels are inappropriate. They did that in case there were things like fights aboard the ship, technical discussions that they didn’t want to share, or if . . . you know . . . a couple of people were . . . you know . . .” She cleared her throat and her face was flaming scarlet. “If someone forgot they were on camera.”

  Luther looked at his nails, suddenly finding them endlessly fascinating. Nirti blushed too. I kept everything off my face.

  “Okay,” I said. “Go on.”

  “So the transmission logs all have to be approved by Colpeys. If he flags anything for any reason, it’s indicated here by his personal code. C1746.”

  She pointed to several instances where C1746 was entered.

  “You’re saying he flagged the videos that show the sabotage?” asked Luther.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure,” he said, “but look at all the times he did that. They can’t all be part of this.”

  Zoé touched one entry. “This is the senior staff meeting. That was flagged. That one is when he was having another of those arguments he used to have with Tristan’s mom while she was still on board.” She pointed out a dozen ordinary events that Colpeys had chosen not to broadcast. “But this . . . that one is the file we just watched. And these others? Those are when Tony Chu was working on the panel, you know . . . when no one else was allowed in there.”