Reentry
Page 29
“Leave!” she yells.
Wen doesn’t stop with the cards. With a bat of her hand, the chips are scattered across the table. In the low Martian gravity, they skim through the air and bounce over the floor of the module. We’ve been on Mars for nine months building the main base, but the sight of objects being propelled under Martian gravity never gets old. It’s jarring to see physical things obeying a rate other than the 1 g in which we were raised. It’s as though the universe has betrayed us, and life on Mars never feels quite right.
“Wen!” Jianyu protests, but the old matriarch will not be pacified, and she screams again for us to leave.
Wen has her long hair pulled back into a ponytail. At sixty-four, she’s the oldest person on Mars, but you’d never guess her age from her work rate or her physique. She’s imposing, intimidating even the men.
James gets slowly to his feet. He sways a little under the influence of alcohol and strange gravity. At the best of times, it’s easy to lose your footing on Mars. For James, this isn’t the best of times. I take his arm. Wen grabs both of us, marching us toward the central hub at the end of the mod.
As we’re in roughly one-third of Earth’s gravity, even the most forceful march is stunted, but I can feel Wen pushing us on. Our feet bounce slightly between steps.
Most colonists struggle to retain 1 g fitness. It’s easy to slack off and settle for less, but not Wen. She used to run marathons on Earth. I doubt she’d have any problem running several back-to-back up here. One of the Chinese men opens the hatch as we’re marched out.
“We’re just having a little fun!” James protests as we’re thrust into the vast central hub connecting the various modules like spokes of a giant wheel. The Eurasians are in the process of closing their outer hatch. The outer hatch to the Russian module is already shut. It’s normal to keep the inner hatches secure to control humidity and airflow, but the heavy outer hatches are only ever closed during containment tests or depressurization drills. It’s the middle of the night. This isn’t about our game. Something else has happened, and not knowing why we’re being treated like this is a little scary. My mind is dull with alcohol, and that thought passes like a bird on the breeze.
Wen yells, “Zhànzhēng fànzi!” as she shuts the hatch. I catch a glimpse of Jianyu behind her. He looks confused, bewildered. He tries to say something, mouthing a few words in English, but I don’t understand.
Zhànzhēng fànzi. Jianyu has been teaching me Chinese. Although I struggle with the sheer complexity of the language, he’s taught me some of the more common expressions, and I remember this one because to my ear it seems to rhyme. In Chinese, I’m pretty sure it means “warmonger.”
I feel like a leper being shunned.
“What the hell?” James says, leaning against the railing of the walkway within the hub.
Starlight drifts down from above.
The four modules that make up the Martian colony are set deep underground within volcanic lava tubes to protect us from cosmic radiation. There’s roughly thirty feet of basalt and regolith between us and the harsh, radiation-scorched surface of the planet.
The four mods have been built in two lava tunnels that converge in the shape of an X. At the center of the X, the roof of the tunnel has collapsed, probably millions of years ago, long before Homo sapiens existed as a species. That’s the crazy thing about Mars: nothing’s new. There’s plenty of fine-dust erosion and the odd meteor strike, but the geological vistas we explore are hundreds of millions—if not billions—of years old. It’s as though the planet has been frozen in time, waiting for explorers from Earth.
The collapsed section above the hub forms a natural skylight some forty feet across and easily visible from orbit. It took almost four months for our automated extrusion builder to create a glass dome over the skylight, forcing us to suit up when moving between mods for what felt like an eternity, but it was worth the wait. Once the dome was in place and the walls were sealed with thick plastic manufactured here on Mars, the hub tripled the usable space within the colony. The glass in the skylight is three feet thick and laced with lead, along with numerous layers of laminate to protect us from radiation. Near the edge, the glass distorts the light from outside, but on a clear night like tonight, you get a stunning view of the stars directly overhead.
Harrison comes bounding out of the U.S. module.
“Where the hell have you two been?” he yells across the hub with its crops of wheat and corn growing in layered fields beneath soft blue grow lights. The hub is huge, and not just because it’s wider than the modules. It’s naturally almost four stories deep. James and I are on a raised metal walkway above the top field, still feeling somewhat bewildered by Wen, somewhat jovial from being slightly drunk, and somewhat enchanted with Mars itself.
Harrison comes running along the walkway. He’s not known for his subtlety. Harrison’s a robotics engineer from landlocked Arizona, yet he swears like a sailor hitting his thumb with a hammer. One of the common misconceptions about life on Mars is that everyone’s a scientist, but it takes mechanics, doctors, and engineers to make the colony work.
“Connor’s been looking for you fuckers everywhere. You need to come with me. Now!”
“Whoa there, cowboy,” James says in a thick drawl. “Just what the Sam Hill is going on?” James is from Canada, but he loves winding Harrison up with a fake Texas accent, even though Harrison’s from Arizona. To James, the mysterious American Southwest is just one big muddle. Perhaps it’s his blasé attitude that makes him so effective at annoying Harrison. I can’t help but laugh.
I slur my words. “Yeah, cowboy. Slow down.”
“Connor wants you back in the mod” is all Harrison will say, refusing to be baited. He grabs James by the wrist and pulls him on. James snatches at my hand, and I fall in step behind the two men, laughing at the madness of such a rush on Mars. The rice wine has left me light-headed and as clumsy as a kid stepping off a spinning fairground ride. Running in Martian gravity is entirely counterintuitive. I lean into the run at an angle that would have me falling flat on my face on Earth, but on Mars it results in a gentle lope.
I can see Michelle standing by the hatch leading into the U.S. module, ready to close the heavy metal door behind us. We’re the same age, but her dark skin is flawless and she usually looks much younger than me. Now, though, she looks exhausted. She’s dressed in her pj’s, barefoot, no bra beneath her top, hair disheveled. Why is she even awake?
“What’s wrong with everyone?” I ask.
Michelle says, “They just nuked Chicago.”
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About the Author
© Callum Rule
PETER CAWDRON is an Australian science fiction writer and the author of numerous novels, including Retrograde (also from John Joseph Adams Books). He lives in Queensland, Australia.
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Footnotes
* https://www.airspacemag.com/space/hibernation-for-space-voyages-180962394/
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† https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-017-0020-1
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‡ http://myxo.css.msu.edu/ecoli/
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* http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com
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† https://www.techradar.com/news/networking/powerline-networking-what-you-need-to-know-930691
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