While I lay in my sleeping bag, half hopped-up on drugs to calm my system, Sophie came to check in on me. She had a few burns too, and her hair smelled of smoke. She sat and held my hand and we didn’t say much.
While all of this was going on, Nirti and Zoé went and checked the feeds from the cameras. Except that’s not what they did because they couldn’t. Instead they found that the cameras I’d placed near the greenhouse had been removed from the wall and someone had crushed them. The debris was floating around, mixed in with blood, soot, and charred plants.
We were back at square one.
The day wore on and the drugs brought me in and out of a set of very weird and ugly dreams. I remembered when Sophie left. She kissed my cheek and whispered, “I’m sorry.” Then she was gone.
The next day I was awake but I felt like a smoked sausage. Everything hurt. Even my hair and teeth hurt.
I checked on Dad, but he was groggy. They’d given him a whole lot of painkillers.
I spoke with Mom, though. And I leveled with her. Told her everything. When I was done there was an odd mix of expressions trying to fit onto Mom’s face at the same time: pride and approval, disappointment, anger, and a cold shrewdness.
“No. You can’t keep out of it,” she said. “Can you?”
“I don’t think I should.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t think so either.”
I told her about my conversation with Sophie, about the “just war.” She nodded.
“Terrorists always need to justify what they do. I guess we all do,” she said. “But when what you want robs someone else of what they want, then it’s not justice. You understand that, Tristan?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I really do.”
“Be careful,” she told me. “These people are going to try again. You understand that?”
“I do. I’ll be ready.”
She frowned at that, but then she nodded. “Don’t give them any chance at all.”
It was the strangest advice I’d ever gotten from my mom, but perhaps it was the best.
Chapter 101
* * *
The ships flew on. Inga had a relapse, which meant that Mom had to keep at it with almost no rest. I spent a lot of time with Dad. We talked about the sabotage and the dangers. We talked about the Golden Dragon. We talked about hatred and radicalism and we talked about being afraid. We talked about dying. But we also talked about fighting back, taking a stand. Dad was a gentle guy who wasn’t much into politics, but he had a strong sense of right and wrong. If I got my skills and focus from Mom, I got my compassion and tolerance from him.
He did not try to talk me out of continuing to hunt for the saboteur. He wouldn’t have done that. Instead he told me to be careful and to be smart.
There were no more attacks.
Probably because Colpeys changed his approach to security. He put adults in pairs to patrol the ship while everyone slept. He tried not to pair the same people up two shifts in a row, but he had limited resources. Tony and my dad were still on light duty, and Colpeys wouldn’t use any of us kids. With Mom gone, that meant there were only thirteen healthy adults on the Huginn.
Everyone knew about the cameras I’d placed. Colpeys found the debris and put two and two together. He yelled at me for a long, long time about how stupid it was to take things into my own hands. Everyone heard it. I tried to argue with him and tried to be reasonable with him but he was too mad. Maybe he just needed someone he could unload on and that was me. I didn’t dime out my friends, though. No reason to do that. I gave up arguing when it was clear it wouldn’t do anything, and then I apologized and told him I’d try to rebuild some from the parts I could salvage. They hadn’t worked like I’d wanted anyway.
Things became routine again.
Then one morning we got word that a NASA satellite had made contact with the Golden Dragon. We all crowded into the common room to hear the news. Dr. Aukes looked very excited as she explained what happened.
“Late last night,” she told us, “at eleven fifty-one Greenwich time, NASA’s Arthur Clarke communications satellite detected an anomalous signal coming from the Golden Dragon. The pattern was processed and analyzed and it was determined that it could not be an automatic signal because the pattern was irregular. Computer analysis was able to verify that it was Morse code.”
I felt my heart leap into my throat.
“The message was in Mandarin, using the old Chinese telegraph code, which is similar to Morse code, and was channeled through a short-range communications system that they believe was taken from a rover. The sender was only able to send electronic pulses. There is no audio or video, and the satellite was only able to pick up part of the message during its flyby. However it will be back in range at the same time tomorrow. An attempt will be made to transmit a message to the Golden Dragon, but we are not certain whether they can receive.”
“What was the message?” yelled Nirti. “Are they okay? How have they managed to survive? What happened to their ship?”
When Nirti realized she was yelling at a video sent with a twenty-two-minute delay, she shut up. Dr. Aukes picked up a clipboard and read from it. “This is the transcript of that message. It is a partial message, as I’ve said, and it is both encouraging and deeply disturbing.”
That quieted everyone in the room, and I could imagine the same silence falling over the people on the Muninn.
“I quote,” said Dr. Aukes, “ ‘. . . survivors aboard ship. All others dead. Ship is damaged. Inner working of airlock damaged. Cannot EVA. Space suits damaged. Supplies and life support low. Twenty-nine days food left at minimum rations. There are eight crew left. I am engineer Ting.’ ”
Dr. Aukes paused and her face became very serious, very grave. “The person who sent the message is a young girl. She is the last surviving teenager of the three aboard.”
“Ting . . . ,” I breathed.
“NASA was able to pick up one last part of the message,” Dr. Aukes continued. “It is a single word, a warning from the girl before the satellite went out of range, but I think it tells us what we need to know.” She paused as if anticipating how bad that word would taste in her mouth. Her lips curled as she said it. “Neo-Luddite.”
Chapter 102
* * *
We were horrified, but we weren’t shocked.
I mean . . . by now, how could we be?
Dr. Aukes gave us all a long talk about cooperation, about caution and protection, about keeping focused on the mission while also trying to ferret out who among our crews wanted us all dead.
We’d all been screened so many times. We’d all trained together for years. For someone to infiltrate us, they’d have had to infiltrate the whole Mars One program. And to guarantee that there would be at least one of them aboard each ship. Zoé said that the statistics made sense only if the Neo-Luddites had a lot of people in the candidates program.
“Otherwise the math is too absurd. There’s no telling how many of them applied and how many of them made it to the top one hundred.”
“And none of them got flagged?” said Nirti. “How’s that even possible?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not like the screening program weeds out fanatics. ’Cause let’s face it . . . we’re all more than a little nuts for wanting to do this.”
“Right, but wanting to do it and wanting to kill everyone isn’t the same thing.”
“Yeah, sure, but who’s going to answer ‘yes’ to a question like ‘are you a murderous fanatical psychopath?’? These Neo-Luddites, whoever they are, aren’t stupid. Even if they don’t dig technology, they understand it enough to sabotage it.”
“That’s weird,” said Zoé.
“No,” said Nirti, “it makes sense. When people back home are fighting, they always try to understand their enemies. I mean, how else can they figure out the best way to hurt them?”
Chapter 103
* * *
The next couple of days were filled with a thousand v
ariations of the same conversation. Who were the Neo-Luddites? Why did they want to stop the space programs? Who among us were trying to kill us? What would they try next?
And how did a teenage girl like Ting keep her people alive all this time? What happened aboard the Golden Dragon? Who lived? Who died? Was the saboteur one of the living or the dead?
The messages from the ship were the same and it became clear that Ting had rigged some kind of repeating loop.
That, though, was not good news. Not really. Because there was no way to tell when she’d rigged that message to start. Her estimation of how much food they had left might refer to some day that had come and gone. The crew of the Golden Dragon could be dead already.
Those arguments were what Colpeys used to try and convince everyone that we should not try to rescue the Chinese ship. There were so many arguments, and so far Lansdorp, Dr. Aukes, and the other people back at Mars One hadn’t made a decision about what to do.
It was driving us all crazy.
We were getting closer and closer to Mars.
Instead of months away, instead of weeks away, we were now only days away.
If we were going to make courses corrections to rendezvous with the Golden Dragon we’d have to make a decision in the next three days.
Izzy kept sending video messages and sometimes even actual e-mails, but now all of her messages were about the Golden Dragon. The news stations on Earth were saying that the Chinese ship had been damaged by a collision with a micrometeoroid. Nothing about the Neo-Luddites at all. I didn’t tell her the truth. Not her, and not Herc.
I talked about it with Sophie, though. We talked a lot about it. She knew her politics and philosophy. Much better than I did. She joked once and said that every café in Paris is filled with people arguing over political issues. She made it sound fun, but that was Paris, not the Huginn. The politics and philosophy of what the Neo-Luddites were doing filled me with such hate that I had to watch what I said. Sometimes I slipped, though, and then I told her exactly what I wanted to do to the psychopath who hurt my dad.
“If I ever find out who it is . . . I’m going to kill them.”
Sophie looked sad. “Tristan,” she said, “don’t you realize that you’re not talking about a stranger? You’re talking about someone you already know. One of this crew. It could be Luther, for all you know.”
I said nothing to that, but I shook my head.
“Or Zoé or Nirti. It doesn’t have to be a man.”
“No.”
She shook her head. “Tristan, for all you know it could be Tony or even your father.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I yelled, but she shushed me with fingertips to my lips.
“Shhhh, just listen. The explosion in the greenhouse could have destroyed the whole ship. It would have if you hadn’t been there. The two people caught in that blast have been mostly confined to bed ever since and in that time there have been no more attacks. It is not unreasonable to suggest that one of them is responsible. And before you answer, think about the Muninn. Most of the crew are still recovering. Some are still confined to bed, and there have been no new attacks there, either. Could it not be that the Neo-Luddite aboard that ship is too sick to do any more mischief?”
I shook my head. “Maybe that’s true over there, but here . . . no. It’s not my dad and it’s not Tony. My mom trusts them.”
“When we left Earth, cher, we all trusted each other. And look at us now.”
A soft bing-bong rang through the ship. The signal for the change of watch. Sophie sighed.
“I have to go,” she said, and kissed me. “Get some sleep and dream of Mars.”
And then she was gone.
I lay there, secure in my Velcro straps but totally unsecure in my thoughts. She had to be wrong. Definitely not Dad. That was just plain nuts. And it couldn’t be Tony.
It couldn’t be.
I tried to sleep but it wouldn’t take me down.
Chapter 104
* * *
After three hours of faking sleep and trying to convince myself I was asleep, I unstrapped myself, quietly undid the zipper on my microbedroom, and floated out into the corridor. The lights were down low and I could hear the loud snore of Director Colpeys and the softer, buzzing hum of Luther.
I felt weirdly alone, like a caretaker in a crypt. Even with the sounds of people sleeping it was like being among the dead. And that thought didn’t scare me so much as it made me sad. I thought of Ting over on the Golden Dragon. A girl not much older than me, an engineer, trying to keep a handful of survivors alive with no way to know if her message had been heard. No way to know if anyone was coming.
Then it occurred to me that maybe she did know. Or hoped, anyway. The Chinese may have kept their launch secret, but the whole world knew about Mars One. The timetable had been set years ago, and we were almost exactly on time. Ting must have known that, so was her message for us? Maybe the NASA satellite would get an update soon. An adjustment to the days of food left. Ting was clearly very smart and resourceful. If all of the survivors on the Golden Dragon were equally sharp, then they figured some way to stretch their resources, hoping for a rescue. Maybe hoping for exactly what was happening—the arrival of two ships from Earth.
My sadness dropped away and I got so excited I needed to tell someone immediately. Sophie was probably in the hab with whoever was on watch with her. I was grinning like an ape as I kicked off and flew through the ship to tell her, and I knew it would make her every bit as happy as it made me.
I was flying, flying, inside and out.
And I flew right into something dark and wet.
It smacked me in the face.
I snaked a hand out and caught a handrail and used the other to paw the stuff out of my eyes, thinking that someone had hocked a loogie and didn’t clean it up.
But then I looked at my fingers.
The dark stuff looked as black as oil.
Oil?
Oh, God . . . no. Not another . . .
The thought ground itself to nothingness in my head because I floated into a small downspill from the night-lights. My fingers were slick with something, but it wasn’t oil.
No.
It glistened a dark, horrible, angry red.
It was blood.
Chapter 105
* * *
I looked up and saw other droplets of it. They filled the air, drifting toward me. From the direction of the hab. My own blood turned to ice and I breathed a name. “Sophie . . .”
Imagining her up there. Dead. Victim of the monster who had gone into space with her. It made me so mad and I suddenly wanted to find the maniac who had come out here just to hurt us. The person who’d hurt my dad and nearly killed everyone else.
I’d never wanted to kill anyone before, but I did now. I hurled myself away from the handhold, grabbed another and pulled, another, another, accelerating through the still, cool air of the ship, meeting no resistance in the microgravity, dragging my hate with me.
With a bellow of rage I burst into the common room, saw two figures struggling amid an asteroid field of blood particles. Saw Sophie’s braid swinging loose. Saw hands scrabbling at a ruined throat. Saw the glint of a knife in a tight fist. Saw the locking mechanism to the command module entry hatch hanging open, wires trailing out, circuits floating free. Saw the big security airlock door gaping wide.
Saw the world—the universe—crack and fall sideways off its hinges. Sophie was there, locked in a deadly battle with Garcia, the ship’s security officer. Blood flew like red jewels. From the edge of the knife. From the terrible, terrible wound in Garcia’s throat.
I screamed.
Sophie looked past the man she had just killed and saw me. I saw her face—that sweet, beautiful face—as it really was. Not the face of my friend. Not the face of someone I loved like a sister. Not the face of the gentlest person among us.
It was the face of madness. It was the face of a killer.
It wa
s the face of a Neo-Luddite.
A bunch of expensive tools floated around her. I saw them with a bizarre clarity. Wrenches, socket drivers, and a set of thin screwdrivers. All the tools that she had pretended not to know how to use but had used so easily. All the tools with which she had sabotaged our ship and bypassed the security on the command module. Once inside she could have fired the engines, burned off all the fuel, sent us crashing into the Muninn, or killed us all in a hundred ways. Garcia had tried to stop her, and paid for it.
I said, “No . . .”
Sophie shoved Garcia aside and he floated away, dead or dying.
“Sophie,” I whispered, “please.”
Her eyes were chips of dark ice. There was nothing in them that I recognized. Everything had been a lie. Everything.
“Why?” I begged.
She put a hand out to steady herself by the airlock. “You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “You’re incapable. All of you.”
“Tell me. Please. I have to know. Why are you doing this? What do you people want?”
She hesitated and edged closer to the entrance to the command module. If she got in there and closed the door, she could do enough damage to prevent any of us from getting down to Mars. Was that what happened aboard the Golden Dragon? I wondered. Probably.
“Tristan,” said Sophie, “I told you about the just war. I told you that there are times people have to fight, have to go to war, do you remember?”
“Of course. You said it was because of God and—”
“This isn’t about God,” she said. “This is about Earth.”
“I don’t—”
“We are failed custodians of our planet, Tristan. That was a sacred trust given to us. To mankind. It’s a common truth that our world is the gift from God, or the Goddess, or whoever you want to believe in. But the gift came with a challenge, a burden. We were to nurture and care for our world. We were supposed to be shepherds in its fields. We were never supposed to rape it and abuse it and tear the heart out of it. And now, having failed to protect our sacred trust, we dare—dare—to go and ruin another pristine world? What sin could be greater than that?”
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