In the Red

by Christopher Swiedler

  “That piece of paper—it was in your dad’s office, wasn’t it?” Randall said. “Now I remember. When we got back from Heimdall, he asked me if I could work out my position using just a distance and angle to some point. I told him maybe, but only if I had a math textbook and a few hours.”

  Michael looked at the paper again. “I don’t think he got it right, either.”

  Randall burst out laughing. “I’m not surprised. Your dad is a smart guy, but that sort of thing is exactly why we have nav computers. I’ll bet ninety-nine out of a hundred Rescue Service officers couldn’t manage it—and you did it without even using a calculator?”

  “It’s not that hard,” Michael mumbled.

  “Neither is rocket science. Wait . . . don’t tell me—you’re a whiz at rocket science too?”

  “I know the basics,” Michael said stiffly.

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Your dad talks all the time about what a genius you are. Every time one of the scientists tries to explain some detail about the magnetic field inducer, he’ll just wave his hand and say, ‘Maybe my son could follow that, but not me.’”

  His son? Meaning Michael, and not Peter? He couldn’t imagine his dad telling anyone that he was any kind of genius. He looked at Randall doubtfully. Hypothesis: adults will tell you pretty much anything when they’re trying to make you feel better.

  “So maybe when you grow up, you can invent some kind of planetary magnetic field that doesn’t crap out on us, eh?” Randall said, separating a few of the multicolored wires. “Hand me the microlaser.”

  Michael handed him the handheld laser. “I don’t want to invent stuff. I want to join the Service.”

  “Ah,” Randall said. “In that case, you’re all set. The academy will snap you up in a heartbeat.”

  “I doubt it,” Michael said. He folded his arms and looked down at the ground. “Environment suit anxiety isn’t exactly a quality they look for.”

  “Suit anxiety? That’s what the doctors told you?”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. He clenched his jaw. “They all say I ought to stay inside the colony.”

  “Mmm,” Randall said. “Obviously you haven’t followed that advice. And so far it seems to be working out for you.”

  “Tell my dad that, the next time you see him.”

  Randall snapped the radio closed and stood up. “Really? He doesn’t want you to join the Service?”

  “Sure he does,” Michael said. “Someday. When I’m better. Which is his way of saying never. Because how often does someone with suit anxiety get better enough to go into the Rescue Service?”

  “Well, how often does someone with suit anxiety survive for two days out on the surface, in the middle of the biggest natural disaster Mars has ever seen?”

  “We were lucky,” Michael insisted.

  “If you say so.”

  Randall put the remaining tools back in the toolbox and turned on the radio. The antenna started to swivel around slowly. Every time it pointed in their direction, they could hear a high-pitched ping over the emergency channel in their radios.

  “All set,” Randall said.

  He opened the outer airlock doors, and they stepped inside. Through the small window in the inner doors, Michael could see Lilith waiting for them.

  “Hey,” he said when the doors opened. “Is everything—”

  “A jumpship!” she said. “I found a jumpship.”

  “It turns out there’s some kind of hangar right down this hall,” she said breathlessly, leading Michael toward the back of the homestead. “You’ve got to type in an access code, but someone wrote it on the wall right here.”

  She entered a code into a panel next to a large set of doors. The panel beeped and the doors slid open. The hangar was dark, but in the light from the hallway they could see a blue tarp covering something that reached almost all the way to the ceiling. The tarp had been pulled partly aside, revealing one of the landing legs and the big engine nozzle of a jumpship.

  “I didn’t touch it,” she said. “It was already like that.”

  Michael pulled off his helmet and shone his flashlight around the hangar. Tiny particles of dust swirled in the beam from his light. Other than the jumpship, there were a couple of rusted fuel tanks and some shelves that were lined with tools and parts.

  “It’s in pretty bad shape,” Randall said from behind them. “It may not even fly.”

  “How do you know?” Lilith demanded.

  “Because I checked it out before you two arrived.”

  Lilith’s jaw dropped open. “You knew about this? And you didn’t tell us?”

  “What’s there to tell? It’s a piece of junk.”

  “But what if it does work?” Michael asked. “Maybe it could take us to Milankovic. Or even all the way back to Heimdall.”

  “I wouldn’t fly in that thing unless my life depended on it,” Randall said. “Even if you could get the engine started, you’d have to fly under complete manual control. There are no navigation satellites, remember? So that ship’s nav computer isn’t going to know the difference between Milankovic and Minnesota. How would I know where to fly?”

  “Michael could navigate,” Lilith said.

  “Sure, with a little time he could work out the initial trajectory. But flying by hand, we’d need to make course corrections. That means recalculating the entire arc on the fly—literally.”

  “He could do it,” she insisted. “Right?”

  Michael bit his lip. “Maybe.”

  “Listen, you’re a bright kid,” Randall said. “But a jumpship is basically a ballistic missile. If we don’t get the braking just right, we’ll make a crater the size of Omaha. And if we’re off by even a few degrees on the course, we could end up farther from Milankovic than we are right now. It’s too dangerous.”

  Lilith shrugged. “All right, whatever. I just thought it was worth looking at.”

  “Right now we’ve got food, water, air, and shelter,” Randall said. “All we’ve got to do is stay safe and wait for someone to come get us.”

  He turned and headed back toward the common room. Lilith folded her arms and leaned against the wall of the hangar. She looked at Michael and raised her eyebrows.

  “You want to check it out, don’t you?” Michael asked. He sighed and glanced back in the direction Randall had gone. “All right. Get your helmet. But be quiet, okay?”

  “Got it,” she said, slipping back into the hallway.

  Michael found the switch for the overhead lights and pulled off the tarp. The jumpship definitely hadn’t been well maintained—there were a few missing sections in the engine cowling, and some kind of oil had leaked from the spot where one of the landing legs attached to the cabin—but it wasn’t in terrible shape, either. Jumpships like this were expensive enough that they were sometimes kept in service for twenty years or more. Michael had seen lots of cargo hoppers older than this one landing and taking off outside Heimdall.

  Lilith came back wearing her air vest and helmet. Michael closed the inner doors and depressurized the hangar. The outer doors slid open, and the tarp flapped wildly for a moment as a gust of wind swept in. Outside, everything was dark except for the faint gleam of starlight.

  With a little effort, they got the cabin door open and the access ladder pulled out. Most of the interior was taken up by a cargo area with hooks and bolts for tying down freight and baggage. There were a couple of jump seats on the back wall for passengers, and a small cockpit up front. The control panel looked like it belonged in some dawn-of-spaceflight adventure movie, but the throttle, control stick, and most of the switches were recognizable enough. Back before his panic attacks had started, he’d flown as copilot with his dad in ships not too different from this one.

  Michael flipped on the main power. A long series of boot-up messages flashed past on the screen, followed by the system’s main menu. Michael poked around until he found the ship’s diagnostics.

  “Fusion battery is low on charge, but it
will last a few trips at least,” he said. “There’s juice for the engine. Its biggest complaint is hydraulic fluid—I’m guessing that’s what leaked out of the fuselage.”

  “So it’s flyable?” Lilith asked.

  Michael switched the screen to navigation mode. It paused for a moment and then flashed several error messages. “Randall is right. The computer isn’t going to be any help. We’d be flying fully manual.”

  He activated the runway casters. The cabin vibrated for a moment as the foot of each landing leg rose up slightly, leaving the ship resting on three ball-shaped rollers. He pushed the control stick forward and the ship shuddered and started to roll toward the hangar doors. Craning his neck to make sure that he didn’t clip the side of the hangar, he guided the jumpship out onto a small landing pad.

  “Does the engine actually work?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  He flipped on the preheaters and waited for the ready lights to flash green. Then he made sure the thrust controls were all at zero and jabbed the ignite button with his thumb. For a moment, nothing happened.

  “No good?” Lilith said with a disappointed expression. “I was hoping we could at least—”

  Underneath their feet, the rocket engine coughed and sputtered. Something clanked once, twice, and then a third time, and then everything was silent except for a faint rumbling in the floor of the cabin.

  “We’re hot,” Michael said, grinning.

  A tremendous vibration ran through the ship. Everything that wasn’t firmly attached to the walls or floors started to rattle. White smoke drifted up from cracks in the floor of the cabin. Michael and Lilith grabbed onto the pilot’s seat.

  “What’s going on?” Lilith asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. He checked through the diagnostics on the pilot’s control screen. Other than the low hydraulic fluid, the ship wasn’t reporting anything wrong. He pressed the button to kill the engine. The vibration stopped, but smoke continued to pour into the cabin.

  “Michael . . .”

  He waved his hand in front of his helmet to clear the smoke and looked around the cabin. How could anything be burning? The Martian atmosphere was almost entirely CO2, which was what you used inside colonies to put fires out.

  “Go,” he said, pushing her toward the cabin door.

  The interior of the jumpship was now thick with smoke. They stumbled down the ladder onto the landing pad. White clouds billowed all around them, swirling and gusting in the wind. Michael spun around, trying to figure out the source of the smoke, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  Something hissed loudly, like a faucet that had just been turned on. The smoke grew even thicker, and then the hissing stopped and everything was silent. Slowly the smoke cleared, revealing Randall standing next to the fuselage holding a fire extinguisher. An access panel on one side of the ship was open, and everything inside was covered with a thick layer of fire-suppressant foam.

  Randall slammed the panel shut. “I guess I assumed that when I said, ‘This ship is too dangerous to fly,’ that could reasonably be interpreted as ‘The two of you shouldn’t try to fly it.’ But apparently I need to be even more explicit?”

  Michael and Lilith looked at each other. “We were just making sure the engine would light,” Michael mumbled.

  “Well, it lit,” Randall said. “Along with a few liters of hydraulic fluid, looks like. So tell me, do the two of you actually think about things before you do them?”

  “Sorry,” Lilith said. “We didn’t mean—”

  “I’ve dug enough graves in my life,” Randall snapped. “I don’t want to dig yours too. Get inside. I’ll clean up this mess.”

  Lilith jogged back toward the airlock. Michael took a few uncertain steps and looked back at Randall, wondering if he should offer to help. But Randall didn’t seem interested in the ship. He walked over to an array of solar panels and wiped a thin layer of dust from each panel. When he was done, he looked up at the night sky with a worried expression. Michael followed his gaze, wondering what he was looking at, but all he could see was stars—there was no sign of a ship, or even a satellite.

  He squinted. There were stars, but only about half as many as he would have expected. The ones that were visible twinkled and pulsed, sometimes almost vanishing before reappearing again.

  Michael’s stomach lurched. Now he understood why Randall looked worried. There was only one explanation for what he was seeing. “It’s a dust storm,” he blurted out.

  Startled, Randall turned toward him. “I thought I told you to go inside.”

  “That’s what’s happening, isn’t it?” Michael asked. “The wind off the ice cap is stirring up dust.”

  Randall pursed his lips. “Looks like it. What I don’t understand is why we’re getting a storm now. It’s completely out of season for this area.”

  Michael scanned the night sky, trying to estimate how much dust was in the air. Right now it was only blocking out some of the fainter stars. But if the wind stayed like this, and the dust kept getting thicker . . .

  Randall put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “Don’t worry too much. We’ve got our radio beacon going. They’ll find us.” He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as Michael.

  But rescue ships weren’t what Michael was worried about. By tomorrow night, the night sky would be completely black with dust. Without any stars to help him, he’d have no way to know which direction Milankovic was in.

  Which meant if he was going to climb to the top of the ice cap and get a signal to his father, it would have to be tonight.

  12

  SNEAKING OUT OF the homestead turned out to be easier than he’d expected. As soon as he was sure Lilith was asleep, he crept out into the hallway and out to the main airlock, making sure to take a route that didn’t go past Randall’s room. He had an excuse planned if either of them caught him: he’d heard something knocking on the airlock door and wanted to check it out. But it wasn’t necessary. Lilith remained fast asleep, and the door to Randall’s room stayed closed.

  He left a hastily scribbled note for Lilith, explaining what he was doing and telling her not to worry. She’d probably still freak out if she woke up and found it, but at least she’d have some idea where he’d gone. And if everything went well, he’d be back at the homestead in a couple of hours without anyone even knowing that he’d left.

  The radio was awkward to carry, and he’d need both his hands free to help him climb, so he brought along an oil-covered tool bag that he’d found in the hangar. He felt a pang of guilt when he dismantled the jury-rigged beacon that Randall had set up. But the beacon would only reach someone who was nearby and already searching for them. His plan was going to get a signal all the way to Milankovic. And of course as soon as he got back, he’d set up the beacon again.

  The rutted path they’d taken off the ice cap and down to the abandoned homestead was easy enough to follow back up again. The slope grew steeper until the black hulk of the ice cap blotted out almost everything in front of him. The wind got stronger the higher he went, snapping back and forth fitfully. Several times he had to wipe a layer of dust and ice particles off his helmet so he could see clearly.

  He stopped when the road began to curve toward the research station. He didn’t know whether the magnetic inducer was still putting out enough heat to be dangerous, but he didn’t want to find out. The station wasn’t high enough up, anyway—he would have to make it all the way to the peak of the glacier if he wanted to get a clear signal to Milankovic. He slung the bag with the radio over his shoulders like a backpack and started to climb directly up the slope.

  Back in the homestead, it had seemed like no big deal—just follow the path as far as he could, and then climb the last few hundred meters up to the top. But climbing a few hundred meters in near-total darkness was a lot harder than he’d expected. The light on his helmet was angled to show things in front of him, not above him,
and so every few meters he had to pause to crane his neck back and search for the easiest route upward. After ten minutes, he had a stitch in his side, and after twenty minutes, his legs felt like rubber.

  It could be worse, he told himself. At least I’m not climbing under Earth gravity.

  He looked back the way he’d come. The light from the homestead had disappeared in the darkness. Somewhere back there, Lilith and Randall were still sleeping peacefully. He hoped.

  The ice cap trembled underneath him, so gently that at first he thought his wrist screen was sounding a quiet alert. The vibration stopped for a few seconds and then started up again.

  The hair on the back of Michael’s neck stood on end. Was the glacier still melting? Or was the ice just settling? He knelt down and put his hand on the ground and waited, but the vibration didn’t return. Cautiously, he stood and looked up at the sky. By tomorrow night the dust storm would turn the sky completely black. If he didn’t get a signal to his dad tonight, he’d lose his chance.

  He resumed his climb. After thirty more minutes, he crested a small ridge and looked around. He’d reached the peak of the glacier. From this spot, he should have a clear line of sight to Milankovic.

  Excitedly, he looked up at the stars and tried to get his bearings. Milankovic was south-southwest from his current position. Michael found the spot in the constellation Cygnus that marked due north and carved out a simple compass rose in the ice with his knife, finally adding a long arrow pointing in the direction of Milankovic. He looked off toward the horizon, hoping he’d be able to catch a glimmer of light from the colony, but all he saw was blackness and swirling dust.

  He knelt down and pulled the radio out of the bag. The external antenna was designed to be attached to something solid, like a roof or wall, so he had to use a few chunks of ice to prop it up. Carefully he aimed it along the arrow he’d drawn so that it pointed directly toward the colony. After a few minutes of digging through the options on the radio’s screen, he figured out how to link it with his suit radio so that it acted as a signal enhancer.