No, it always looked like this in here. This impression was confirmed when Rick pulled the storage chest out from under the bed. Even the documents in here were stacked edge to edge, all addressed to Senator Rick Ballantine. A former Senator and one that shared his first name to boot. Rick quickly pulled the bug out of his pocket and taped it to the underside of the bed. By now, he had this process down pat, and he shouldn’t waste any time on it. Who knew how bad the problem with the toilet really was?
Rick got to his feet and turned toward the bathroom door near the foot of the bed. This seemed to be the only real comfort that the guest cabins had to offer. He cautiously opened the door and was shocked to encounter his own distorted face. What the heck happened here? A head-sized ball of water was floating at the center of the bathroom. The passenger had probably first tried to take care of the toilet problem himself and had misused the shower in his attempt. However, the air vent should have sucked up all the water. Was that the actual root of the problem? Rick pulled out his hand vac and sucked up the ball of water.
He then inspected the toilet. He pushed the button that looked like a flush mechanism, but in this case, the button wasn’t designed to release a flow of water. It was supposed to trigger the suction mechanism for the solid and liquid waste. Nothing happened. In the crew restrooms, the pumps were divided into solid, liquid and shower water. Because of spatial limitations, only one pump and ventilator combo had been built in the guest bathrooms. It must have stopped working.
Rick knelt down on the floor. The device was located underneath the seat. He removed the housing, which for practical purposes was held in place with magnets. This meant he didn’t have to waste time on a bunch of screws. Whoever had designed this device must have guessed that these things would need to be regularly repaired. Close to the pump’s hull, one thick and two thin hoses flowed together. He needed to loosen the fastener. In this case, the weightless environment was advantageous, because whatever was stuck in the tube would stay where it was and not drip out. Only the odor particles continued to follow the law of Brownian motion, taking pleasure in their freedom and dancing around everywhere, including his nose.
He now had a good view of the pump and the ventilator. He shined his flashlight inside it. Something yellowish-white glistened on the rotary blades. Had he already located the source of the problem? He was about to reach for it when he thought better of it. A glove would be a good idea for this. He tugged one onto his right hand and valiantly reached for whatever was in the ventilator. It was soft and slippery. Rick pulled it out and immediately recognized its purpose. The neat-freak Senator had tried to flush a used condom down his toilet. Unbelievable!
He felt an urge to give the man a piece of his mind, but he would let the FM do that. The question that mattered more to him was, who had the man had sex with? He was clearly traveling alone. Maybe he shouldn’t even tell the FM what he had found. He pulled a small bag out of his toolbox and stuck the condom inside it. Who knew? This item might prove handy at some point. The man wasn’t in a public relationship, so it seemed. But it couldn’t hurt to have a Senator on his side.
Sol 68, Mars surface
It had been a mistake to spend the previous night in the tent. Seeing her injured body had caused her to seriously consider giving up. Several spots were infected. The inside of her thighs looked especially bad. In desperation, she wrapped a thick layer of toilet paper around them to absorb the blood, sweat, and pus. She would spend her final night in her suit. At least she wouldn’t have to see how miserable her body looked. She would sleep the minimal number of hours before setting off as early as possible. All she could do was hope that her adrenaline would carry her through until then.
There would be no additional nights after that. She had decided that when she set off on her trek. When she reached the alleged destination her second self had in mind, she would open her helmet. She had no intention of letting herself reach the point of slow asphyxiation. If she used her oxygen conservatively, it might last for an additional day, but why would she subject herself to a day of torture?
Ewa looked ahead. She was in the process of crossing an ancient crater, at the center of which was a gravel field full of small and large rocks. She briefly considered skirting the area but decided against it. She scaled the first boulder and then leapt from stone to stone. It reminded her of a trip her family had once made to the beach. It must have been to the Adriatic coast in Croatia. She and her sister had jumped over the large, spray-dampened, black stones strewn across the beach. She had slipped while doing this and hit her head against one of the water-smoothed rocks. Not much happened. The doctor had diagnosed nothing except a minor concussion, but her seizures had started not long after that.
The stones here were rough, far from smooth, even though three billion years ago there might have been water around here. But they were just as black as the rocks at the Croatian coast. When the meteorite hit the Mars surface, the resultant frictional heat must have melted the projectile’s crust. Ewa imagined liquid stone cinders raining down into the crater. Or had the material hardened while still in the air? Whoever or whatever had been located in the impact area would have been pulverized instantly. Ewa wondered what this might mean for the MfE base. Mars lacked a thick atmosphere like Earth’s, which caused smaller meteorites to incinerate. If they really wanted to survive, they needed to create several settlements. A single meteorite impact shouldn’t be allowed to extinguish the entire remnant of humanity.
Ewa laughed. It helped to think about something else besides her impending death and her pain. But of course, there wasn’t really a point in doing so. No one would ever again ask her for her opinion regarding the future of the MfE initiative. She was out, once and for all.
And what if what she had written with her own hand in her journal was true? What if there really was something inside her that was capable of controlling her mind? Ewa was sweating, but this thought sent a cold chill down her spine. She almost hoped that it was all a hallucination, an external force inside her head that could alter her personality at any moment. If she gave this careful thought, this was much scarier than imagining that she had some kind of illness. It would mean she wasn’t really a murderer, but she would be a vastly graver threat to everyone with whom she was associated. She would never be able to be around other humans again. The implant’s knowledge might save her life, but she couldn’t imagine spending the next sixty or seventy years in isolation.
She had to do something. If there was a foreign object inside of her, she couldn’t let herself grow dependent on it. She had to regain control.
5/28/2042, Spaceliner 1
Out of nowhere, his companion slugged him in the stomach. Rick doubled over in pain. What was the man doing? What did he want from him? Had he done something to him? Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the man’s astonishingly large fist come toward him for a second time. It was situated at the end of a three-meter long arm made up of chains. However, before the fist reached Rick, his alarm went off. He opened his eyes and glanced to the side. His clock indicated it was 3:50 AM. It wasn’t what had gone off, though. His watch had awakened him.
Someone was calling him in the middle of the night.
Something must have happened.
Rick searched for his pants, which had slipped under his bed. One side of his wardrobe stood open. He was positive that he had closed it before retiring. Rick glanced over at the clock. A thin layer of dust had gathered on the shelf it was sitting on. The alarm clock must have slipped out of place, which Rick could tell by the trail left behind as it slid through the dust. Had the blow to his stomach been real? Had the ship been hit by something? The clock had moved in the direction of the bow, so the spaceship must have decelerated momentarily. He hadn’t heard a ship-wide alarm go off, so he must have been alerted individually. There had to be a problem with the propulsion system for which he was responsible.
He counted eleven people on the command bridge. This was more t
han twice as many as a standard shift. A man in a fashionably tailored suit immediately caught his eye. He was wearing a small name tag with gold letters, which distinguished him as a passenger with special privileges. Rick tried to make out the name. Short first name, longer last name. Well, well. If it isn’t the Senator himself! Rick smiled at the thought of the small item in the man’s cabin. If he only knew!
At that moment, Terran appeared behind the Senator.
“Rick! You’re finally here.” he said, floating toward him.
Rick raised his hands defensively. “I got here as quickly as I could.”
He noticed the Senator send Terran a look. He looked like a gentleman who had just silently given his dog an order.
And Terran—tall, strong Terran Carter—responded. “May I introduce Rick Ballantine, one of the main sponsors of this trip.”
The Senator smiled. To Rick, the smile seemed artificial. He held out his right hand, and Ballantine shook it.
“You’re one of the propulsion engineers, right? Terran has already told me about you,” he said.
“Hopefully, nothing negative. I’m a jack-of-all-trades around here.”
“Ah, I see, ‘A jack-of-all-trades...’” The Senator’s smile struck him as increasingly wolfish.
“My specialty seems to be bathrooms and toilets for now,” Rick said. “The engines don’t need me all that often.”
“So, you were the one who repaired my clog? What was the problem?”
“The ventilator had stopped working. It’s a common problem, especially in the private passengers’ rooms.”
“I’m afraid I need to cut your chat short,” Terran said. “We have a serious problem.”
“My apologies,” the Senator replied. “I don’t want to keep you from your work.”
“Have you been briefed already?” Rick asked. He was annoyed that Terran had apparently been called before himself. They had the same rank, so the flight manager should have notified them at the same time.
“Seventeen minutes ago, all of our thrusters fired at the same time in the same direction. This is what caused our brief deceleration,” Terran explained.
“Someone hit the brakes? Or was that not the cause?”
“The sensors didn’t indicate any obstacles on our course. There wasn’t anything out there at all.”
“So this was just a little hiccup?” Rick speculated.
“Fortunately, the pilot on duty reacted quickly and deactivated the thrusters.”
The pilot had done well. If the thrusters had fired for a more extended period, they might have been pushed off their course to Mars. This would have resulted in a multiple-years odyssey through the Milky Way. They would have reached Earth again in two and a half years, but such a long time in such a tight space wouldn’t have been any fun.
“And now we’re supposed to figure out the cause,” Rick declared.
“You’ve got it.”
“Then let’s get to work.”
Rick floated over to his seat which was located off to the side of the consoles used by the pilot and the flight manager, while Terran seated himself at the next console. Rick buckled himself down—you never knew—and pulled up the schematics for the thrusters on his screen. Distributed around the ship, they were intended for making small adjustments. Once they were close to Mars, they would be needed to turn the spaceship so it could be slowed down by the ship’s main engines. They worked on the same chemical basis as the main engines, though with significantly less power.
Rick went through the status of each of the individual components. The data revealed what he already knew—twenty minutes ago the thrusters had been activated with power parameters that were clearly beyond the normal limits. Someone not only hit the brakes, but jammed the pedal so hard that it almost reached the floorboard. The pilot was clearly not the culprit. He couldn’t have activated the thrusters, even inadvertently, beyond their foreseen power limits.
With his finger, Rick zoomed in on the separate structural areas. He searched for errors that could have begun a chain of unfortunate events that led to the known result. Their instructor had always enjoyed talking about the thrust-reversal actions in aircraft propulsion systems, pointing out that their inadvertent firing sometimes led to accidents. It was impossible to safeguard against all eventualities during the construction of an engine. Rick didn’t really think that this had anything to do with the problem because it had influenced all the thrusters simultaneously. But he had to completely eliminate this as a possibility.
Rick couldn’t find glaring errors in the data. “There aren’t any organic causes,” he said to Terran.
“I’m not finding anything either,” his colleague replied. “But theoretically, the error could be hiding somewhere in the hardware. Not every component is furnished with error sensors.”
“Those that are likely to break are,” Rick noted.
“That’s true. We should check everything anyway.”
“You want to dismantle twenty-four engines.”
Terran didn’t answer right away. It had to be just as evident to him as it was to Rick that this would be an unpleasant, tedious job. He would prefer cleaning out ten clogged toilets to crawling around for hours in the narrow, hot, stuffy shafts inside the spaceship’s hull. First and foremost because it would be completely pointless.
“Let’s be honest, Terran. The components without error sensors don’t have any because they only fail once a century or so. And this rare occurrence supposedly affected all twenty-four thrusters at the exact same time? To experience such a result, you would have to wait longer than the universe has even existed!”
“You’re right, but it’s protocol. We’ll have to check if we can’t locate any other cause.”
“Then we’ll find another cause!”
Rick was already considering the possibility of simulating an apparent cause. He could fabricate an error, one that would be easy to fix. But the danger that he would be found out was too high. Besides, he wasn’t really comfortable doing this. The strange hiccup could have sent them off course, potentially even into an eternal orbit, if the pilot hadn’t been paying such close attention.
“Do you have any other suggestions?” Terran asked.
“Let’s go through the entire sequence of orders for each of the separate engines. They all reacted synchronously, so there had to be some kind of system-wide control order sent.”
“All right. You take numbers one to twelve, and I’ll start with thirteen.”
The two of them were working hard a few minutes later. The command storage unit functioned like an airplane’s black box. Its contents were encrypted in such a way that any manipulation would be noticeable. Rick had to sort out the data and then verify the function of all the decoded orders.
Rick was anxious to finish ahead of his colleague, and he managed to do that. “I found something,” he said, deliberately keeping his voice calm.
“Give me a minute,” Terran replied.
Ha! I got there faster.
“Okay, I have something interesting, too,” Terran said shortly.
“Shoot.”
“At almost exactly 3:48, all the engines received a change direction order.”
“I can confirm that,” Rick said.
“The order came from the ship’s comp, which is why it could authorize something beyond the normal limits.”
“True. The comp is authorized, in emergencies, to push the power limits to their max,” Rick added.
“Exactly. So, we have to figure out why the system thought it was in a state of emergency,” Terran said.
“In order to do that, we will need the pilot’s authorization. Who’s on shift right now?”
“My friend Maggie,” Terran said. “She’s just given me access. I’m sending you the data via your console.”
Rick clenched his jaws. Terran seemed to be quite well-connected. Rick made himself a mental note to make more friends on board. “Thanks,” he said.
They went through the records side by side. The four-eyed principle was a relic from NASA policy. Rick would have done away with it a long time ago if he could have. The technical risks were much lower today than they had been eighty years ago during the Apollo era.
But then he noticed something. Shortly before 3:48, the moon suddenly appeared in the sensor data. It must have briefly popped up right in front of the ship. The comp had trusted that data and immediately initiated evasive maneuvers. It had then noticed its error and corrected it. The pilot’s manual countermand had come a few tenths of a second later. However, from a human perspective, it looked as if the pilot had saved them.
“Do you see that, too?” Terran asked.
They exchanged glances. It was obvious that Terran would like to allow his friend to keep the honor of having rescued the ship. Rick didn’t have a problem with that. He saved the data to his private files. It was always good to file things away for rainy days.
“I see that the comp mistakenly believed there was an obstacle in our path,” he said. “The pilot rightly rescinded its order.”
Terran smiled gratefully. Technically speaking, Maggie hadn’t done anything wrong, even if her reaction hadn’t actually been necessary by that point.
But that couldn’t be the whole story. Rick continued to evaluate the relevant data. What else had happened during the fractions of seconds just before 3:48? His eyes fell on the data for the antenna. At that exact moment, it had received a signal. Rick checked its direction. The impulse had come from Earth, but the data content was no longer available. It had probably been some kind of instruction that had ended in self-deletion.
“Maggie,” he called across the command bridge, “could you ask Mission Control if they sent us a message at 3:48?”
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