Saving Mars

by Cidney Swanson

  It was rumored, but no one had dared him to do it. He didn’t invite or welcome conversation.

  “Well,” said Jessamyn, “If you need someone for grunt work, I’m at your disposal. I won’t have much else to do.”

  Crusty grunted.

  Harpreet smiled at them both, but whether it was because Jessamyn’s attempts at conversation amused or pleased her, Jess couldn’t tell.

  “I’ll be on the bridge, Payload Specialist,” said Kipper, rising to depart.

  “If Ethan’s on the bridge still, would you tell him I’m calling it a night?” Jess asked. Catching Harpreet’s gentle eye upon her, Jess restrained herself from adding but he can wake me up if he needs me.

  The Captain nodded curtly.

  Harpreet smiled, and this time Jess felt sure what it meant: Well done, daughter.

  Crusty, bent over the used walk-out suit for a thorough systems-check, called after Jess as she rose to leave. “Thanks for the offer to help. You’re like your ma, you know.”

  Jessamyn flushed and smiled. Usually people remarked upon her similarity to her granddad, which was fine, but this was a welcome change. Turning forward to her quarters, she tried to remember what she knew about her mom’s acquaintance with the gruff mechanic. She had just entered her room and pressed the hatch button to close behind her when she heard Crusty’s voice again.

  “Bells of Hades!” he swore.

  Jess caught the utterance as her door slid shut. She paused, then punched the hatch button to re-open her door. It pulled back just in time to reveal Crusty, racing for the bridge, shouting on the ship’s comm to the Captain.

  “Shut down the whole mid-section!”

  Harpreet, trailing in Crusty’s footsteps, stopped to speak to Jessamyn. “It’s the ob-deck leak. The patches didn’t take, and the seal-doors aren’t to airlock specification. He’s going to have to seal off the back end of the ship.”

  Jess looked down the hall. She could already hear the grind of the emergency airlock seals. “My brother!”

  “Is he not on the bridge, child?”

  Jessamyn was already dashing along the hall to make sure. She called out, “Ethan? Eth? You on the bridge?”

  Reaching the front of the ship, she looked to her brother’s seat at the communications panel. He wasn’t there.

  “Where’s Ethan?” cried Jess. “Stop the isolation protocol!”

  “Belay that,” shouted Kipper.

  “No,” Jess shouted, “You have to stop—”

  Kipper bellowed, “Get off my bridge, First Officer.”

  Harpreet, examining a screen, spoke softly to Jessamyn. “It cannot be stopped, daughter. The hull breach is venting air into space at a terrible pace.”

  “My brother!” cried Jessamyn.

  “Payload Specialist, seal the aft sleep quarters as well,” called Kipper. “Mombasu, get her off my bridge, now!”

  The order was unnecessary; Jessamyn was already running, hurling herself at the emergency bulkhead, calling her brother’s name. Harpreet grabbed Jess, threw her to the ground, and used her own weight to pin Jessamyn.

  “You cannot cross the seal!” said Harpreet.

  Jess struggled—a mad, wild thing desperate for freedom.

  Harpreet shouted, “Listen: the Captain has ordered the bulkhead on the far side to be closed as well. If I allowed you to pass, you would suffocate, sealed between doors.”

  The bulkhead’s set of airlock doors bolted into place, shuddering the floor beneath Jess’s pounding heart. Harpreet shifted off of her, allowing Jessamyn to move. But Jess lay still.

  “He’s trapped,” she whispered.

  “He’s safe from the breach,” replied Harpreet. “He is in his quarters and he is safe.”

  Crusty pounded down the hall, a leak detector in his outstretched hand. He ran the device along the seams of the bulkhead. “We have a lock-seal on this side, Captain,” he said into the comm-link.

  Kipper strode down the hall as well, calling into her own comm-link. “Communications Specialist Jaarda, do you have a secure seal on your side?”

  Jess dug her nails into her palms as she heard her brother’s voice. “The airlock doors have followed the protocol for confinement mode. I detect no leaks.”

  “How are your oh-two levels?” she asked.

  “I am checking,” replied Ethan.

  Jess held her breath.

  “Oxygen levels in the aft portion of the ship are stable,” said Ethan.

  “Good,” said the Captain. “But I still want you to suit up immediately. We’re going to evaluate the possibility of bringing you through the aft airlock, past the ob-deck, and through the mid airlock. Do you copy?”

  Crusty spoke to Jessamyn. “The doors to the ob-deck aren’t airtight, but they’re shut, and that should be enough to get your brother past ‘em.”

  Jessamyn’s voice, when she found it, was so low as to be almost inaudible. “He has no suit.”

  Crusty swore.

  Kipper turned. “What in Hades is wrong now?”

  “It’s the walk-out suit, Captain,” said Crusty. “I left it in the rations room. I hadn’t finished checking it, Sir.”

  There was only one walk-out suit assigned to the aft quarters—the quarters intended to house a captain. In the hushed moment that followed, Jess cursed herself for not having foreseen this.

  “‘Fraid he’s stuck,” said Crusty.

  “I’ll take him a suit,” said Jessamyn. “Suit me up and I’ll carry an additional suit to Ethan.”

  Kipper hesitated. “Your idea has been noted, Jaarda. Crusty, I want you on the bridge. You, too, Mombasu.” She strode along the hall.

  “I’ll suit up,” Jessamyn called after her.

  Kipper whirled to face her. “I have issued no such directive. You will confine yourself to quarters, Jaarda. No one is going through those airlocks until Crusty and Mombasu confirm it is one-hundred percent certain such an attempt will not place Specialist Jaarda or yourself in additional danger.”

  Jess bristled, ready to shout down her captain, disobey direct orders, and otherwise do anything necessary to rescue her brother.

  But Ethan spoke first. “I believe they will concur that the safest course of action would be for me to remain here. I have air and water.”

  Jess opened her mouth to speak, but found she had nothing to say and closed it again.

  Kipper spoke to Ethan as she continued her march to the bridge. “Specialist Jaarda, I’ve got the payload specialist and Harpreet running checks for me right now. We’ll get you out if we can.”

  Her back against the wall, Jess slowly shrank to the floor, knees up in her chest, hands loose at her sides. She wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.

  Remembering the earpiece that allowed her to communicate privately with her brother, Jess jerked her head to one side, activating the device.

  “Hey, Eth,” she said as she heard his beep in response to her hail.

  “Jessamyn.”

  “You okay?”

  “I am in excellent health. I have water and oxygen.”

  “Check your pockets,” said Jess. “I’ve seen how you stuff your rations away ‘for later.’”

  She heard a rustling noise as he searched.

  “Jessamyn is correct. I have food as well. That is fortunate.”

  Yeah, thought Jess. This whole thing’s just one big piece of fortunate. Aloud she asked, “What are you going to do?” She felt her fingernails as they dug into her palms.

  “I will rest.”

  Jess sighed in frustration. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did Jessamyn intend to inquire after?”

  “You’re in a small room, Eth. What’s your plan for dealing with that?”

  “Thanks to the generosity of Captain Kipling, I am in the largest quarters normally reserved for a captain.”

  “Yeah,” said Jess. She itched to ask for more, to demand that her brother present a five-step plan, but then she remembered what Harpree
t had said. Allow him to prove things to himself. She sighed.

  “Okay, so, um, call me if you get bored,” she said.

  “It is unlikely boredom will be a problem. I require sleep. When I awake, I have a wafer-computer to read. I have occupations to forestall boredom.”

  But what about forestalling claustrophobia? She felt her nails digging into her palms again and took a slow breath, unclenching her fists.

  Her brother was an adult. A remarkable adult. It was time she started treating him that way.

  “Goodnight,” she said. “Call me if you need, you know, anything.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “Hey, Eth?”

  “Jessamyn?”

  “Would you leave your audio earpiece turned on?”

  There was a pause before he answered. “Very well.”

  “Thanks, Eth. Goodnight.”

  Her brother, having already uttered the word once, did not repeat it a second time. Before long, Jess heard the regular sound of her brother’s sleep-breathing. It lulled her, reminding her of the nights she’d spent sleeping on his floor before launch. Without intending to sleep at all that night, Jess fell fast asleep. When she awoke the next morning, hearing nothing from the audio device, she thought at first that her brother was sleeping still. Then she remembered the device was supposed to shut down when she slept. Shaking her head to the right, she reactivated her link to Ethan. To the sound of her brother humming to himself.

  She sat up at once. For most people, humming was an activity carried out when they felt especially happy. Her father hummed while working. Her brother, however, hummed—at one unvarying pitch—only when severely distressed.

  “Ethan?”

  He paused and then resumed his flat hum.

  “Hey, Eth. You don’t sound so good.”

  The humming stopped again. There was a quiet pause before Ethan spoke. “I am coping.”

  “Um, yeah,” said Jessamyn.

  “The Captain informs me—” Her brother paused again. “The Captain informs me it is too dangerous to cross through the sealed portion of the ship, and I concur.”

  Jess’s heart contracted and she punched her firm mattress.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. So, um, three days to go, huh, Eth?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Come on, Eth, you got to talk to me here.”

  “Speech is challenging at this time,” said Ethan.

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “I have endured only one panic attack, however.”

  Hunched over on the edge of her bunk, Jess ground her palms against her knees.

  “One’s better than ten, huh?” She squeezed her eyes shut tight. What a stupid thing to say. “How about I tell you a story?”

  “Yes.”

  Jessamyn launched into a tale about a dragon guarding a treasure. The crazier tales accomplished two things: they gave her brother something to focus upon during the time it took her to tell them, and it gave him a series of logical fallacies to pick apart when she had finished.

  Jess glanced at her chrono-tattoo as she drew to the tale’s close. The bright red glow told her she needed to join the others for morning ration and then begin her duty shift.

  “That tale was ridiculous, Jessamyn.”

  “Yeah, I know. Good one, huh?”

  “If by ‘good’ you mean ‘improbable,’ then, yes,” said her brother.

  Jess laughed. He was being funny. Funny was good. “I need you to do something for me, Eth. You get out your wafer and type up all of the things that make that story impossible, okay? All of them.”

  She heard her brother’s soft breathing.

  “That would be a time-consuming pastime,” he said. “Jessamyn tells highly unlikely stories.”

  “You work on it.”

  Ethan’s interactions with his sister on the second day were brief. Jess noted that Kipper had trimmed a few hundred kilometers here and there during her duty shift. The Captain’s kindness—or perhaps desperation—encouraged Jess to do the same. At the end of her own duty shift, Jessamyn’s brain ached from the hundred calculations she’d run and re-run to shave off a few thousand kilometers with minute course adjustments.

  Earth grew closer and larger, but by his third day of confinement, Ethan stopped talking at all, humming at a monotone pitch exactly calibrated to shatter his sister’s heart.

  Jessamyn left her audio comm permanently turned on in case he should call for her. Off-duty, Jessamyn could focus upon her brother exclusively. But she had felt him each day passing beyond help, locked in a tiny prison of the mind with boundaries more definite than those of the quarters in which he now lived. Jess spoke to him constantly, told stories when she could, and begged him to hang on, please just hang on.

  When Kipper discovered Ethan had become non-responsive, she began to talk of changing the mission once more. Jessamyn scowled and told Ethan increasingly improbable stories, but secretly she feared Kipper was right. And even if her brother recovered entirely, would he do so in time to complete the hacking mission? Or had he traveled all this way only to suffer, only to fail?

  Chapter Eleven

  SKY TOO BLUE

  Jessamyn allowed that some might call the spinning blue and white planet below them beautiful. But dread filled her heart as she contemplated Earth from the Galleon’s bridge. Where were the warm reds and golds that whispered home? To her, the planet appeared a chill and hostile place, fit dwelling for those who had destroyed the Red Dawn and her brother’s peace of mind. She felt now that her Earthward yearnings had been childish dreams—gossamer things which fluttered away before the cold reality of the planet beneath her.

  Terrans had grown complacent through the years, no longer patrolling the skies for Marsians. Most believed Mars Colonial had long since perished, and if members of the Terran government knew otherwise, they kept it to themselves, speaking of the Mars Project only in the past tense. Now, the Terran government kept a lazy eye out for any of their own people tempted to break the regulations in place against flights more than 300 kilometers above Earth.

  Nonetheless, for a century, Mars had paid for the secret maintenance of blind spots within Terran surveillance, and Jess followed the coordinates from MCC more carefully than she’d ever followed orders before. If she burned through the atmosphere at the wrong angle or wrong speed or if she deviated from the specified path by even a half-kilometer, the Red Galleon would be visible on Terran monitors. And there was always the very real danger that an amateur astronomer might notice and report them.

  Her fingers flying across the navigation panel before her, Jess caught sight of the European continental mass. She adjusted her ship into geosynchronous orbit above the blue planet. In a few minutes, she would have the final landing pattern calculated and the Galleon would continue its descent.

  A small smile crept along Jessamyn’s face. In spite of the loss of the Red Dawn, in spite of her brother’s sufferings, Jess couldn’t help but feel a rush of pride as she guided the Red Galleon down to Earth exactly like the great raiders before her had done.

  “Commencing final descent on my Mark: three, two, one, Mark!” she called.

  Easing the ship through Earth’s dense atmosphere felt different from coming in to land on Mars where one second you were surrounded by black space and the next you were touching the rocky surface. But the ship and Jessamyn worked well together.

  “That’s right, my beauty, nice and easy,” murmured Jess. She gave the ship one final series of commands and then she was free to gaze at the surface beneath her.

  “Nearly there, Ethan.”

  His hum, a constant in her ears, faltered for a moment and then resumed.

  The now-large island of Britain slid off the view screen to reveal a smaller island off to the northwest: her destination—the tiny, ash-covered Isle of Skye.

  Falling into this world, the crew was silent, hushed by the strange colors, or maybe the solemnity of their charge to save Mars. Even the Gal
leon quieted before the final noisy vertical landing on the green-and-ash-colored surface that had played home to Mars’s ancestors.

  A cloud of grey-blue volcanic ash billowed around the ship.

  We made it, thought Jess. Aloud she said, “Captain, the Red Galleon has landed.”

  She wanted to rip off her helmet and race for the sealed doors separating her from her brother, but there were protocols to follow, systems-checks to run; and besides, she couldn’t take him outside until the ash settled.

  The Isle of Skye, just off the west coast of Scotland, endured regular dustings of volcanic detritus from Iceland’s two dozen active volcanoes. The nearby volcanic activity made the remote Scottish island an undesirable location to most, but a quite perfect location for the clandestine activity of Clan Wallace, maintainers of the black market trade with Mars.

  Jess rushed through her duties as Harpreet, beside her, attempted communication with their Terran contact. It would have been Ethan’s job, had he been on the bridge. Jess was glad the task hadn’t fallen to her; her skill set with communications systems consisted of the ability to shut them down when she wanted to.

  While completing her tasks, Jess heard a voice on the receiving end. Clear. Crisp. An oddly accented, Hello?

  Harpreet followed a simple script. “I wish to speak to Brian Wallace.”

  “Aye, ye’ve found him, then, haven’t ye?”

  “We’re here about the sheep,” said Harpreet.

  “Bloody right on time, aren’t ye?” replied Wallace.

  Jess glowed briefly with pride in her precise landing.

  “I’ll code the gate to let ye pass,” continued Wallace. “Take the second left and ye’ll see me place.” The call was disconnected.

  Crusty spoke over the ship’s comm. “Captain, the confinement barriers are down mid- and aft-ship.”

  Jess jumped from her seat. “Permission to leave the bridge, Captain?”

  “Permission granted,” said Kipper.

  Jess wobbled down the hall. The ship’s artificial gravity was off now that the Galleon had landed and Earth’s gravity pulled, insistent, although Jessamyn didn’t have the inclination to give it much thought. Pounding upon the button to open her brother’s door, she called his name. The door receded and Jess rushed to her brother’s side.