Saving Mars

by Cidney Swanson

  Death, always intrusive, felt so wrong here—a wrong-ness that grated along her spine like a rock traced upon glass. Lobster, red-bearded and laughing, couldn’t be merely “no more.”

  Seated alone in the pilot hotseat, Jessamyn couldn’t see the others. But she could hear their feelings in the way they breathed. A hitched gasp, an inhalation suddenly held, a sigh too agonizingly long.

  The Captain broke the silence.

  “Communications specialist, you will please send a transmission to MCC indicating the loss of our sister ship and the loss of …”

  Jess heard the strain in Kipper’s voice as she forced herself to continue.

  “The loss of Captain LaFontaine, First Officer Tedjomuljano, Payload Specialist Ben-David, Communications Specialist Neru, and Negotiations Officer Wu.”

  “Aye, Captain,” replied Ethan.

  “First Officer Jaarda, will you please confirm our course heading?” asked Kipper.

  “I’ve adjusted course to take us to Earth,” replied Jessamyn. There was no question of doing anything else—the Red Galleon would have to accomplish both missions now.

  Behind the Galleon, the golden globe of Mars seemed to watch as the lasers continued their work, cruelly reducing the Red Dawn to finer and finer pieces, so much space debris. Jess flicked off the screen showing what was now, irrevocably, a part of the mission’s past. A chill that originated in her bones hummed and vibrated inside her, cold as space.

  She felt a primordial impulse to close her eyes and scream, but instead forced herself to run checks using her instrument panel. The Galleon appeared to have forgiven Jessamyn’s exacting treatment. Are you grateful you were spared? wondered Jess. The question pinged back to her: Are you grateful? Are you? Her fingers made course adjustments automatically, and it seemed to Jess almost as if she was watching someone else piloting the ship.

  Below, her home world retreated, and she allowed herself to gaze at Mars, to watch it as it raced away, or as she did. The planet shifted from a yellow-orange sphere to a smaller orange-y circle and finally a reddish smudge against a backdrop of velvety black. Jess lost all sense of time as she sat, immobile, watching her world shrink away.

  “First Officer,” said the captain’s voice inside Jessamyn’s helmet, “I’d like a word on a private line.”

  Jess felt a cool emptiness in her stomach. She knew she should feel something more: Kipper was almost certainly going to offer praise for the quick thinking that had allowed the Galleon to escape.

  “This line’s secure, Captain,” Jess replied with a sigh. She wasn’t in the mood for congratulations. Or for Kipper.

  “What in Hades did you think you were doing back there?” asked Kipper, sounding like she had Mars-sand stuck between her backside and her flight suit.

  The question caught Jessamyn off balance. I could win an award for my inability to predict other people’s responses to my actions, she thought. Closing her eyes wearily, she asked, “Could you specify which part of my rescue of the Red Galleon and her crew you’re referring to?” She heard the sarcasm in her voice and found she didn’t regret it.

  “We could start with the part where you began shouting orders to LaFontaine, without reference to the fact that your rank is inferior to—was inferior to—”

  Jessamyn cut Kipper off. “I was trying to save his life. Which I think you can agree was more important than worrying about who outranked whom. Sir.”

  “It was insubordinate and unprofessional in the extreme, First Officer, and it may have cost the crew of the Red Dawn their lives,” said Kipper. “If this ship had a brig, you’d be cooling your heels in it right now.”

  Jess’s throat burned with the words she couldn’t say with certainty—that it wasn’t her fault. Instead, she lashed out. “Fine. Send me to my room.”

  “You will address your commanding officer with respect, First Officer Jaarda.”

  “Send me to my room, sir.” Jess knew she sounded like a child. In truth, she felt angry and frightened to a degree she hadn’t known since childhood.

  She heard Kipper’s loud, angry exhalation.

  “Jaarda, you will confine yourself to quarters for the remainder of the watch. You will write up a full report detailing the possible harmful consequences of the maneuvers to which you subjected the Red Galleon and her crew. You will evaluate the possibility that you endangered our sister ship, and you will compose letters of condolence to the family members of the crew of the Red Dawn.”

  Jess sighed. “Okay.”

  “First Officer, you are a member of my crew and you will answer your captain according to standard protocols.”

  Jess closed her eyes. She could do this. “Aye-aye, sir.”

  Another loud exhale. “Captain out.”

  Jess wasn’t surprised by how her commanding officer treated her; rumors had reached Jessamyn that Kipper had tendered her resignation when she’d found out Jess would be her first officer. And Jess knew exactly why Kipper had, in the end, remained on the mission: returning home as a victorious raider would help her politically. Jess despised her for using the command of such a mission as a stepping stone.

  But Jessamyn had promised Lobster she would try to get along with Kipper. Her throat tightened as she remembered the conversation. She owed her fallen friend this much. Jess entered the quarters she would share with Harpreet for the next three weeks. She found that she craved the relief of examining every choice she’d made upon the bridge, laying bare what had happened and why and how. Far better this than the haunting question: Could I have done something that would have saved both crews?

  Collapsing on the upper bunk, Jess pulled up the ship’s vid log. How quickly everything happened. From the ship’s first warning of discovery to her final, daring maneuvers, only four minutes of time elapsed.

  She replayed the moment where she had put her ship into a hard turnabout—the moment the lasers lost the Red Galleon. She saw how they overshot their target and then ceased firing, seeking the missing ship. It had been pure dreadful luck that placed the Red Dawn square in the line of fire. Jess steeled herself to observe the video and saw how the laser had sheared through the Dawn’s wasp-like midsection, cutting the crew off from the bulk of their propulsion rockets. Horrified, she saw Lobster trying what she would have done herself: burning side thrusters in small bursts to turn the crewed half of the vessel back toward Mars and the safety of a lower orbit. But the laser tracked the movement and opened steady fire upon Lobster’s helm. Without the big thrust engines, the Dawn hadn’t stood a chance.

  Jess stopped the vid and leaned back in her chair. In saving her own ship, she’d exposed Lobster and his crew. The image of the laser burning through the Red Dawn kept repeating itself in her mind’s eye, a torment never to be forgotten. She rose desperate to go somewhere, but then she realized where she stood—aboard a space-faring vessel confined to quarters. There was no planet-hopper to take her deep into the Marsian desert. And so, kneeling in the center of her quarters, Jess grieved in the manner of her people, moaning tearlessly, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.

  Harpreet found Jessamyn like this during the hour before evening rations.

  “Child,” she said, placing her own strong arms around Jess. “Ah, daughter. We blame the wind when it blows dust upon our windows. But the wind blows for a thousand reasons we cannot name, sparing our neighbor’s windows one day and our own another.”

  Jess felt the strong arms surrounding her and curved her head into the embrace.

  “Let blame go, daughter. Cast it to the wind to be borne far away.”

  Jess pulled back, nodding. “I’ll try.”

  “Come and eat, child. Our stomachs are permitted no rest, even though our hearts have broken.”

  Together, they rose and joined the other three. Kipper seemed to have calmed herself. No longer accusatory, she greeted Jessamyn with a curt nod.

  Over the subdued meal, Kipper addressed the other four crew members. “We have received three t
ransmissions from MCC in the hours since the destruction of our sister ship. The first contained the Red Dawn’s audio log.” Kipper paused. “It appears that once the Galleon was initially struck by laser, Captain LaFontaine determined to draw fire from the Galleon no matter the cost to himself, his ship, or his crew.”

  Jessamyn’s heart wrenched. Of course. It made sense. Why else would he leave his entire flank open to fire?

  “In doing so, he was following orders given by the Secretary General. In the event that the safety of one ship became compromised, the Red Galleon’s safety was to be held paramount.” Kipper’s eyes rested on the table. “The men and women of the Red Dawn, under orders, sacrificed themselves to give us a chance.”

  The Galleon crew sat in silence, digesting the revelation.

  Then Kipper spoke again. “In the second transmission, the Secretary General extended solemn congratulations to our crew for having passed into deep space, along with a special commendation of First Officer Jaarda’s bold tactics, without which, and I quote, ‘evidence suggests the Red Galleon would have been lost as well.’”

  Jess tried to feel satisfied with the commendation. But she felt only empty. She would never again swap stories with her red-bearded friend. Never again ask him for a vehicle it would have been wiser for him to withhold. She swallowed hard against the lump swelling her throat.

  “In the third transmission, the Secretary informed me that while the final decision is hers, MCC is split as to whether or not to recommend the assignment of both missions to our single crew. She added that it will likely be days if not weeks before they are able to agree upon a recommendation.”

  Harpreet placed her hands atop the table, bringing her fingertips together as if in prayer. “Yet our time is limited by the length of the journey. So it will fall to us to create a course of action,” she said quietly, her gaze upon her hands.

  Kipper nodded. “She suggests we determine for ourselves whether the two tasks can be accomplished by five persons using only the Galleon. There are no other space-worthy vessels to send. The Galleon must retrieve rations for Mars. The question is whether or not we will also attempt to transfer satellite command from Earth to Mars Colonial.”

  “Hades, yes,” said Jessamyn. “We’ve all seen what those death-rays can do.”

  The Captain bristled but did not reprimand Jess for the interruption. Instead, she continued. “I would like to ask Negotiations Specialist Mombasu to consider this matter. As the only one of us with prior experience of the conditions on Earth, I will be guided by her when I present my evaluation to the Secretary.”

  Jessamyn refrained from rolling her eyes at the Captain’s stiff formality. Jess had made the point she wanted. She hoped Harpreet would agree with it.

  The Captain addressed Harpreet. “Will you please prepare a recommendation for me by 06:00 tomorrow?”

  Harpreet bowed her acquiescence.

  “Very well,” said Kipper. “We will begin our deep-space rotations immediately. Crew dismissed.”

  The Captain, Harpreet, and Crusty, the on-duty officers, filed out of the rations room. Ethan remained and Jess approached his side.

  “You okay?” she asked softly.

  “The Galleon’s supply of tellurium must prove adequate,” he replied.

  Jessamyn frowned. “Adequate for … ?”

  “Harpreet must now convince our Terran contact that the supply of tellurium currently in our hold is as valuable as a double amount of ration bars.”

  “Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.” Jess shrugged. “Harpreet’s a shrewd negotiator.”

  “She will have to be.”

  “Hmm,” agreed Jess. “But you didn’t answer my question, Eth.”

  “The tellurium must be enough, so it will be. Ethan must survive this journey, so he will.”

  Half a smile crept onto Jessamyn’s face. “You amaze me, Eth.”

  Ethan checked the chrono-compass tattoo on his wrist. The deep red glow matched what Jess knew she would see on her own.

  “It is time for me to visit the observation deck,” said Ethan, rising.

  Jessamyn raised one eyebrow. “It’s time?” she asked, following her brother on the brief walk.

  “I believe that regular visits, in six-hour intervals, will allow me to better manage the three weeks before us.”

  “Oh. That’s really smart, Eth.”

  The two entered the ob-deck, kept darkened for better viewing of the heavens.

  The stars! Jess saw them as sharp prickling points, scattered carelessly by a sower of star-seed. They swam dizzily before her as she tried to take them all in at once, differently colored and sized, in quantity beyond what anyone could number.

  “It’s beautiful,” murmured Jess, after they’d sat in silence for several minutes.

  “I find the outlook to have a balancing effect upon my autonomic nervous system,” replied Ethan.

  Jess laughed quietly. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I meant.”

  “You will pardon me,” said Ethan, “But I do not believe that is what you meant. Jessamyn finds beauty where others are not able to appreciate it. I do not believe that it is the beauty of what I observe that calms me. It is simply that when I view the vastness before us, I do not feel as uncomfortable as when I am confined to … other parts of the ship.”

  The two sat in silence before the canvas of ink-black, spattered with the bright dust of a thousand worlds. Jess felt a tugging grief, a Lobster-shaped space inside her that was now empty.

  “I can’t believe I’m not going to see him again,” Jess said.

  “Him?” asked her brother.

  “Lobster. All of them. You’ll miss Wu, won’t you?”

  “Wu was a formidable opponent in Monopoly,” said Ethan. “I will think of him often, and when I think of him, yes, Jessamyn, I will regret his absence.”

  Jess felt a flash of hot anger against Earth and the cruel satellites. “Promise me one thing, Eth. Promise you’ll take control of that laser array.”

  “That is what I am meant to do.”

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” whispered Jess. “It’s wrong. As wrong as …” Jessamyn broke off, unable to think of anything that was comparably unwarranted.

  Her brother sat beside her, not speaking, not demanding that she complete her thought. She found his presence deeply comforting.

  At last, pointing to the heavens, she spoke again. “We’re traveling fifty-five million kilometers and the stars don’t change. They should be different, don’t you think?”

  “What other stars would they be?”

  “I don’t know. It seems like, if we journey so far, shouldn’t the stars be different?”

  “Fifty-five million kilometers is a very short distance, Jessamyn. We are not leaving our solar system.”

  “I know. It just feels like … I don’t know how to explain it, Eth.”

  “We are small creatures, Jessamyn, and the universe is infinite.”

  Jess followed the arch of the treated observation window from one side to the other across the field of stars. “Yeah, guess we all got a good dose of our insignificance today.”

  “We are small, but we are also infinitely great, Jessamyn. Infinitely important.”

  “You figure?”

  “Our companions are gone, but their importance reaches outward and onward. For each of us. For everyone on Mars. Their importance is boundless. Like the universe.”

  The pair sat in silent contemplation of the heavens. At last Jess spoke again.

  “Do you believe that, Eth? That the universe simply goes and goes and goes?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “I know it’s infinite.” Jess said, repeating her brother’s word. “But do you actually believe in it? In infinity? In something that has neither beginning nor end?”

  “I believe,” said Ethan.

  “Hmm,” sighed Jessamyn.

  Between Mars and Earth, while clocks kept time with the stars, the Red Galleon and her
crew advanced toward hope.

  Chapter Nine

  ANOMALOUS READING

  Prior to the inception of the Terran Re-body Initiative, Earth faced several grave problems. Overpopulation had led to hunger and war on an unprecedented scale. Local governments attempted to eliminate these problems, but none had anything like the success of those who recompensed desired behaviors using a variant of a re-bodying program. Such plans offered a reward, in the form of placement inside a new younger body, gifted to those citizens engaging in behaviors that combated their nation’s worst problems. Put simply, the Terran obsession with youth provided an incentive to work toward peace and plenty. But where to find healthy young bodies in numbers sufficient for those who had earned them? A program in Belarus gained precedence and became the model for the worldwide Terran Re-body Initiative.

  Predicated upon the idea that youth was wasted on the young, eighteen-year-olds “swapped” places with fifty-four-year-olds using a method of consciousness transfer. The eighteen-year-old, now said to be in “twobody,” spent the next eighteen years in the aging fifty-four-year-old body whilst apprenticing for the work that would be his or her life’s contribution. At the end of the apprenticeship years, another body transfer was made into “threebody.” (Most Terrans agreed that the switching from a seventy-two-year-old body into a thirty-six-year-old body was the single most satisfying transfer.) Threebodies thus had a body age that matched their chronological age. And when they completed their eighteen years of useful contribution and good behaviors (their “working years”), they retired, at the age of fifty-four, into svelte, young, eighteen-year-old bodies for the last quarter of their lives.

  A beautiful solution, agreed most Terrans, providing severe checks against anti-social behaviors at eighteen year intervals. The one fly in the ointment was that, in order to provide a steady stream of correctly-aged bodies at correct intervals, life spans had to be limited to seventy-two years. No one was allowed to reach a seventy-third birthday, in any body. It was a price most Terrans were content to pay. They had peace, they had food, they had a lovely retirement plan for eighteen truly golden years. And besides, prior to the peace brought by the Terran Re-body Initiative, life spans of seventy-two years, though possible on Mars, had become rare on Earth.