The air pressure was still dangerously low, but there was enough pressure and oxygen, they thought that they might be able to reach the hab.
Not that they had a choice.
Katia appeared, screaming at them in her own language.
No doubt profanities.
She was clearly furious that they’d blown up their only way of getting off of the Rogue.
“What have you done? Look what you’ve done!”
Wilkes, not surprisingly, was shocked speechless when he saw her.
“You think we blew up our god damned ship—nearly parboiling ourselves in the process—on purpose, bitch?” Claudia snarled at her, huffing for breath. “We’re well and truly stranded on this godforsaken world now!”
“No!” Katia screamed. “You must go! You must go now! Right now! Before he comes back and ….”
That was telling. Claudia felt her heart jerk reflexively, but how much could she mean to him? Really?
Sure, he’d threatened Katia’s life when he discovered she was using them for guinea pigs, but he shouldn’t have trusted the bitch to start with! He should have watched her to make sure she did as she was told, shouldn’t he? Certainly after he’d caught her.
Or was he just so used to having his orders obeyed that it didn’t occur to him that she would disobey?
Well, according to what she’d let slip, she had a habit of not obeying his orders.
Then again, maybe she’d set it up to look like they had escaped and she wanted them gone before Torin could question them?
Did it matter? They weren’t going anywhere now.
“Come! The little thing you have. We find it and fix it for you.”
Claudia, Reyes and Wilkes halted abruptly.
“What are you talking about?” Claudia demanded.
“The Lander?” Reyes demanded.
“You have it?”
“Yes! That thing! The small rocket thing!”
“We can’t get home in that!” Wilkes snapped. “It’s a Lander. It was only designed to take us from the ship to the surface and back again. That’s why we never looked for it! We couldn’t spare the time to hunt something we knew was useless to us!”
Katia looked furious. “I bring it! You go!”
When she vanished as abruptly as she had appeared, the trio looked at one another and then turned in the direction of the hab. Their air tanks were still producing air, but it was escaping as fast as it was produced. And the level of oxygen wouldn’t be sufficient if they were working hard—like slogging through melting ice over rough terrain in suits that weighed around sixty pounds. The atmosphere was still too thin of oxygen. They would pass out and probably die of exposure.
They were freezing now.
They needed to take something for the radiation exposure if they could find the pills in the med lab.
They were in sight of the hab wheel when the Lander glided past them and settled to the ground between them and the hab.
They stared at it blankly, waiting for the hatch to open and the pilot to climb out.
“Do not simply stare at it you stupids! Get inside and go!”
They all jumped at the sound of Katia’s voice. When they whipped a look in the direction it had come from, they discovered that there were about a dozen of the blue aliens standing with her.
So this was the conspiracy group, Claudia thought.
Wilkes approached the Lander and punched in the code to open the airlock.
Reyes followed him as he made his way up the ladder and climbed inside.
Claudia was more inclined to head for the hab since they were so close, but she was frozen. The shelter the Lander offered was too much to resist. She followed Reyes and climbed inside.
The aliens had vanished by the time they turned to look back as the hatch closed.
Without a word, the three of them entered the Lander when the inner hatch opened and began checking systems.
To their surprise, and despite what the alien woman had said, they discovered the Lander was fully operational.
Apparently, they actually had fixed the ‘thing’. It seemed very unlikely it had come through the crash in this condition.
Wilkes immediately contacted Houston control. “Houston! This is Commander Wilkes of the IP Expedition One, calling from IPEO Lander one. Do you read?”
Chapter Eleven
They could hear cheering in the background when Houston responded. “Expedition One! Happy to hear from you! We thought we’d lost you!”
Wilkes glanced at Reyes and Claudia, but they would be thoroughly debriefed when and if they got back. They didn’t have time to waste on extended, superfluous—for the moment anyway—conversation. “We lost the ship,” he said grimly. “We have Lander One. Can you crunch some numbers for us and tell me if we have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting out of here with the Lander? This place is waking up and becoming more unstable by the hour.”
The director’s voice was no longer jubilant when he responded. It was as grim as Wilkes’. “Suffice it to say conditions down here have been getting a little … unsettled, too. That Rogue has created a lot more havoc than anybody expected. It changed course. It sped up. It has slowed down. It reached the asteroid belt sooner than we’d expected and picked up a train. One meteor the size of Texas narrowly missed us. One almost as big as a cruise ship didn’t miss. We’re in the middle of evacuating as many people as we can—to the Mars colonies and to higher ground when that’s all we can do.
“We can launch an interception, though, from Mars base as originally promised, but it’s going to take longer to reach you if you aren’t able to come to us. What have you got in the way of supplies?”
Wilkes looked sick. “Most of our supplies were on the ship we lost.”
“We have a week’s supply with us for two people,” Claudia volunteered, struggling to feel heartened by that when she knew it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
“And there are some emergency supplies on the Lander,” Reyes added then shrugged. “Maybe a weeks’ worth for the three of us.”
Wilkes signed off with NASA to devote his entire attention to prepping for lift-off.
“If we have time, we can scavenge whatever’s left in the supply hab,” Claudia suggested. “We need something for the radiation we were exposed to anyway.”
“Get on it,” Wilkes said quickly, “while we’re waiting for a response from Houston—all the air tanks and water you can find. We can fast if we have to. We can use the splitter to break the water down into oxygen if we have enough to spare.”
Nodding a little jerkily, Claudia headed out to get the supplies strapped to the snowmobile. Reyes followed her to help load them into the Lander.
“Don’t leave us,” Reyes said pointedly.
Wilkes met his gaze for a long moment. Anger flickered in his eyes, but he dismissed it. “I wouldn’t consider it even if I thought I had enough on board to make it by myself.”
Reyes nodded and he and Claudia climbed on the skimobile and headed for the supply hab. It was dismaying to see how much Wilkes and Johnson had cleaned out, but Reyes and Claudia scoured the supply hab from the top to the bottom and managed to round up a water/filter and extraction unit, enough water and food for roughly a month—if they consumed the bare minimum—and enough oxygen tanks to supply them with air for two weeks, max.
They didn’t really have time to run any calculations to have a higher degree of certainty. And, in any case, what they had was what they had. There was no store to run to for what they lacked.
When they got back to the Lander, they discovered Houston had run numbers and come up with a way to slingshot the Lander away from the planet toward the rendezvous.
The bad news was that it was going to burn up all of the fuel and they wouldn’t be able to maneuver. They would be adrift in space and if, for any reason, the rescue ship didn’t reach them, they were dead meat.
The choice was to stay with the Rogue and take their chances.
>
Or try to get home.
Claudia was the only one that was torn and she wasn’t altogether certain of why.
Both propositions were extremely iffy.
The Rogue was unstable already and bound to get more unstable the closer it got to the sun.
Of course, there seemed to be some fear of the possibility that it would collide with Earth or another planet close by and take everyone out.
No one really knew what was going to happen because they’d never had anything of this magnitude to deal with.
And beyond that, the Rogue wasn’t behaving the way logical science decreed. It had to be predictable for science to calculate what it would do.
Home might not be there when they arrived.
They might simply drift till they died.
She shook all of the doubts. There was no choice, really. It just seemed as though they had a choice.
She helped prep the Lander and strapped herself into her seat.
She realized as soon as she heard the engines come to life why she’d felt so much dread at leaving the Rogue.
It wasn’t the Rogue she dreaded leaving.
That realization created a hard knot of emotion in her throat, but she knew there was nothing there to dread losing. She wasn’t even sure any of it had happened outside of her mind or that it was real in any sense.
However real it had felt to her.
But, even if it had been, she didn’t see that Torin could have failed to know that Katia was sending them away and that meant he was in agreement that they should go.
Naturally.
They were alien to one another. She’d never thought of him as an enemy, but that wasn’t to say he felt that way.
Katia had certainly made it clear that she considered them enemies and it seemed hard to argue that the rest of their people wouldn’t feel exactly the same way.
Humans didn’t belong on their world.
And humans would certainly agree that Torin’s people didn’t belong on theirs.
That brought to mind the report that everyone was being evacuated that could be in an attempt to get them to a safe place.
As useless as that attempt might end up being, none of Torin’s people would be evacuated. They had nowhere to go and no way to get there as far as she knew.
If they survived the close encounter with the sun and inner planets, they had nothing to look forward to but drifting forever in space.
She struggled with her empathy for a few moments and managed to thrust it to the back of her mind. It was anyone’s guess if anybody would make it out of this deadly dance alive.
She supposed it might ease her fears for her personal safety to focus on everyone else, but it was doing very little to calm her.
The longer they sat waiting for a go from Houston, the more the conditions deteriorated. If they didn’t get the go signal soon, they might not be able to launch at all. Winds were gusting harder and harder outside. The ground beneath them trembled.
She was never going to see Torin again.
Even if a huge series of miracles occurred that somehow saved everyone, there would be no happily ever after.
Those thoughts made her feel like crying.
Which was stupid!
She did feel as if they’d connected on a level that was rare, but her intelligent side told her it was the survival thing.
So they’d had a night together.
Or she’d dreamed they had.
And she felt as if they’d formed a bond.
They really hadn’t.
Even if it had actually happened instead of happening in her mind because of some sort of manipulation on his part, it wasn’t a connection.
She had made herself feel as if she was in love with him, or falling in love—connected above the ordinary plane of existence.
She was still trying to convince herself that it was all false, all mind games, when Wilkes got the go and launched their Lander skyward.
They pulled so many G’s she passed out, briefly.
There was so much noise in the small space when she came around that she instantly had a blinding headache.
Then she realized it wasn’t necessarily the noise level.
They were weightless.
She struggled with a nearly overwhelming sense of panic.
The Lander was too small for any sort of artificial gravity—that humans had the technology to produce anyway.
By the time she’d regained control of her emotions, Wilkes had already executed the first maneuver. They had six hours to wait for the next one and then twelve after that.
Basically an entire day before they’d have any idea of whether the fates were smiling down on them or if they were doomed.
They wouldn’t even have enough fuel left to land again by the time they’d performed the third maneuver and knew for certain they were or weren’t going to make the rendezvous point.
* * * *
NASA wasn’t a ‘flying by the seat of their pants’ kind of organization.
That was why it was so hard to fully accept that, on this occasion, there was nothing else they could do and therefore they couldn’t be counted on as they generally could be. There were just too many variables and not enough reliable information.
They’d done their very best because it had become a do or die situation and there was no choice but to give it their best guess.
It was the margin of error that was going to kill them.
It was actually pretty ironic that they had a 95.9 percent chance of success and they’d fallen on the wrong side of it.
They’d managed to achieve escape velocity with the maneuvers NASA engineers had come up with.
They’d even managed to retain enough fuel for a couple of course corrections in the days following, although they’d expected to use up every ounce of the fuel tearing themselves loose from the pull of gravity of Rogue 719—Vishnu as the natives called it.
But neither they nor NASA had had the opportunity to do any calculations on their supplies because they hadn’t had time to inventory them.
It looked like they were going to be dead at least a few days before the rendezvous—maybe a week.
Not that it mattered how dead they were or how long they’d been dead.
They’d been extremely conservative in what they’d used until they had time to figure it all up and calculate how long it would last.
And they’d still used too much.
They couldn’t go any faster to reach the rendezvous sooner.
The rescue ship was struggling to increase their speed to close the gap.
But everyone knew it wasn’t going to be enough.
They’d kept the bare minimum of water they needed to stay alive and sacrificed the rest to be broken down into air because they could do without water much longer than they could do without air.
They’d shaved weeks down to days and it still wasn’t going to be enough.
This wasn’t the way Claudia had pictured their great adventure ending. It wasn’t the way she’d expected to become a footnote in history.
She supposed, in the eyes of the world it would be a hero’s death. It wasn’t likely that it would become common knowledge that they’d simply lain around the Lander for days on end, trying to conserve energy and oxygen until it had all run out and they’d slowly suffocated.
But she would have far preferred to have a hero’s life.
Now there would be no one to claim her poor little baby eggs, she thought forlornly.
She’d left a dozen frozen for safekeeping, unwilling to take a chance that all of her ovum might be too damaged by radiation after so many years in space to be viable—left with the certainty that part of the ‘hero’ package was that her child would be welcomed to the gene pool.
She’d be able to have one without becoming a hate target.
Hopefully.
It had become ‘socially incorrect’ to reproduce.
The governments couldn’t pass laws to preve
nt people from having children—directly. They still had some freedom, some rights!
But they had waged a very long, very successful propaganda campaign to convince people that anyone that had a child was taking the food out of their mouths, literally, using up critical resources that much faster and endangering everyone. And it had become a ‘witch hunt’—like the ban smoking campaign launched decades earlier and the ‘fat equals gluttony’ campaign and the ‘water wasters’ campaigns that followed.
Pregnant women had been targeted for hate to the point that the birth rate had fallen well below the death rate so many years that the global population was actually declining and had been for well over a decade.
Globally, they were back down to seven billion and dropping rapidly now.
It wasn’t entirely because of the ‘stop irresponsible reproduction’ crusade.
Global climate change had thrown out so many disasters—some on a massive scale—it had decimated huge swaths of the population. Widespread famine and global pandemics had also wiped out in mass and indiscriminately.
And then there was the bombardment of meteors caused, they now knew, by the Rogue passing through the Ort cloud and probably from the Kuiper belt, too. They’d managed to ‘dodge’ the worst of what had come at them. But they’d been pretty thoroughly pelted by smaller meteors that caused death and destruction. And the people of Earth had been holding their breath, figuratively speaking, for years in the expectation that a planet killer would appear out of the darkness and wipe out the entire planet.
It didn’t look like she was going to get the chance, now, to see if she could have a child in peace and raise it without the censure of her peers—because she’d gone above and beyond to insure the continuance of the human race.
The alarm on her suit went off, alerting her to the fact that her distress was causing an increase in heart rate and breathing.
It was sufficient to distract her from her morbid thoughts so that she could practice calming exercises.
By the time she’d slowed her heart rate and breathing, she was drifting toward sleep.
It was mostly what she did to pass the interminable journey and an accomplishment of sorts.
The weightlessness had made it difficult to sleep at first. Floating around in a tethered sleeping bag meant that she was prevented from bumping into Reyes and Wilkes or drifting into some of the equipment and possibly damaging it, but the endless sense of falling was unpleasant to say the least.
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