Jancey awoke to the sound of voices on the veranda, a wide porch that overlooked the pool. She slid out of bed without waking Mila and peered through the slats of the shutters to see Sir Charles leaning against the rail as he spoke with Grace.
Seven thirty a.m. Pretty early for a social call. The press conference wasn’t until two in the afternoon.
As quietly as she could, she laid out her clothes for what would be a media day, a freshly pressed flight suit.
By the time she stepped out of the shower, Mila had joined her in the bathroom. From her half-closed eyes, she wasn’t yet fully awake. “Any idea what all that yelling is about?”
“Who’s yelling?” Jancey asked.
“Sounds like Grace, but I can’t make out what she’s saying.” She rubbed her eyes and looked at Jancey. “How come you’re dressed in that?”
“We have a press conference this afternoon. Did you forget?”
“Evidently. You killed all my brain cells when you took my head off last night.”
Jancey stretched up on her tiptoes and kissed Mila on the nose. “You are such an amateur. I’ll go up and see what’s going on while you revive your poor little brain.”
She found them sitting in overstuffed bamboo chairs around a low table, each nursing a cup of coffee. Sir Charles and Grace. Though Duke and Sasha met her with wagging tails, the others were clearly upset.
It was too early in the morning for them to be having a bad day already. Whatever their problem, it appeared to be a private matter. After a cordial greeting, she poured herself a cup of coffee and turned to leave.
“Something’s come up, Jancey,” Grace said. She held out a glossy photo.
Jancey hesitantly approached, noting their grim faces. It was an eight by ten color shot of their analog habitat. A sunny day. Morning, given the shadows tilted toward the west. Mila was outside in her spacesuit, apparently conducting her walk-around. Then she noticed what made it remarkable—she wasn’t wearing her helmet.
That was a cardinal sin, enough to disqualify them from the competition.
Obviously it was taken with a telephoto lens from the east. Not a perfect photo but clear enough. With everyone positioned along the same altitude, it could have come from the Fagans, from Jerry, or even someone farther away. “Where did you get this?”
“I received it via email last evening when I got back to my room,” Sir Charles said.
The Fagans had left immediately after dinner. “Do you even know if it’s real?”
“It’s been authenticated,” Grace replied softly. “No evidence of Photoshop.”
Authenticated. At least they hadn’t simply accepted it outright.
This didn’t make sense at all. Why wasn’t Mila wearing her communications cap? They’d been in constant contact every time one of them went out. Every single time. “This must have been taken before the analog ever started. I remember we tried our spacesuits on when we were up there setting up the dome…we walked around a little to get used to them. Maybe Mila walked outside, but it shouldn’t have counted against us then.”
Sir Charles shook his head. “My staff tells me it’s geocoded and time-stamped for last Thursday, just before we announced the Super X solar storm.”
Jancey recalled the morning clearly. She’d stayed in bed while Mila had done the walk-around. In fact, she was still inside the sleeping chamber when Mila returned, so she hadn’t actually seen her in her spacesuit.
She picked up the photo to study the details. No sign of Mila’s phone. No earbuds. No wireless device affixed to her ear. Her hands were encased in thick gloves, so it wasn’t feasible that she’d been using the tiny keypad on her cell phone. How was she communicating?
“There’s something wrong here.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Sir Charles said. “A simple mistake might have been forgiven had Ms. Todorov admitted to doing this accidentally. Instead, she signed a form indicating she had obeyed all the rules and restrictions, and that clearly is false. I’m afraid there is no alternative but to disqualify your team.”
His words hit her like a physical punch to the gut.
Grace sat forward and shook her finger. “You’re being hasty, Charles. This is a decision for the committee. The entire committee. Regardless of this single incident—which could never actually happen in space—I would still argue that Mila and Jancey represent the project’s very best chance for success. At the very least, we should hear from Mila.”
“Hear from me about what?” Mila walked casually onto the veranda and poured hot water over a teabag. She too was dressed in her flight suit, its sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her hair, still wet from the shower, was pulled back in a tie.
Jancey could barely contain her pique at her casual demeanor. “You need to get over here and explain yourself before we get disqualified.”
“What?”
Grace took the photo from her hands and handed it to Mila. “This was sent to Sir Charles last night. Jancey was just telling us there must be a valid explanation for this.”
Mila studied the photo in silence, her face growing redder by the second. “When was this taken?”
“Last week…right before they called up to announce the Super X. You went outside that morning to do the walk-around.”
She needed to hear Mila offer an explanation, however feeble it might be. Her helmet was broken. A bee had flown inside and she’d been forced to rip it off.
“I have no memory of this. As far as I know, I always put on my helmet to go outside. It was automatic.”
Under the circumstances, that was as good a response as any. An oversight was better than a deliberate flouting of the rules.
Grace turned to Sir Charles. “Which means she was being honest when she signed her form saying she’d adhered to the rules. That’s something the committee should consider.”
Jancey’s question was more pointed. “But do you distinctly remember wearing it? You talked to me while you were outside. Did you have it on?”
“I…” She hesitated too long to be convincing. “I thought so.”
“Your uncertainty is problematic,” Sir Charles said, and then turned to Grace. “The issue was raised by one of the competing teams, along with charges of favoritism. Everyone knows about your friendship with the major. That was something we all were willing to overlook when it became obvious they were the better team. This clouds that. I worry the press will focus on infighting among our astronauts instead of the mission. Or worse, they’ll criticize the whole project based on the selection process. We can’t allow something like this to undermine our integrity.”
Jancey felt her panic rise as she whipped her head from Grace to Sir Charles and back.
Grace shot her a worried look before pressing her case. “With all due respect, Charles, we owe it to all the members of the committee to allow them to make the decision together. Perhaps there is something short of disqualification…Jancey and Mila could forfeit their position and fly later in the rotation.”
He lumbered to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane. “There’s very little time to act. We have reporters flying in this afternoon from all over the world. Call the other members of the committee. Tell them to come to Tenacity Centre right away.”
If his dour tone was any indication, the meeting would be a waste of time.
* * *
Mila drew in a deep breath and grasped the door handle of their bedroom, relieved to find that Jancey hadn’t locked her out. She was shocked to see her stuffing her belongings into a suitcase.
“What are you doing? Nothing’s been decided. They’re taking it to the whole committee. We might get bumped down but Grace won’t let them disqualify us.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Jancey spat, not even looking up from her task. “You heard what Sir Charles said. We went in with a strike against us because Grace was my friend and they didn’t want anyone to think they were playing favorites. And don’t think for a minute they wanted the first two people on Mars to be a pair of lesbians. We made them choose us. Our scores were so high, they had no other credible alternative. And now we’ve lost that advantage.”
“I don’t know how this happened. I have no recollection of going out without my helmet but…”
“But what?” The brusque tone wasn’t frustration or disappointment. It was anger.
“It’s just that I’d taken that zolpidem a few hours earlier because I couldn’t get to sleep. It’s possible I did something without being aware.”
“Great, so it’s my fault for making you take a sleeping pill. That’s rich.”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just trying to figure out how it happened. I remember when I came back in telling you about Brandon Fagan staring at me. We joked about how creepy he was, how we wouldn’t ask him to dinner if we all ended up on Mars. I think he’s the one who took the photo. Maybe he was looking at me like that because I didn’t have my helmet on.”
“It doesn’t matter who took the photo.” Jancey dumped the contents of the nightstand’s drawer into a small bag, zipped it closed and tossed it into her suitcase. “What I find so maddening, so…excruciating, is that I watched you go in and out two or three times a day for six weeks, and the one time I didn’t see you, you went out without your helmet.”
It hurt to see her so quick to believe the worst, though it was hard to argue with the evidence. Brandon Fagan obviously had caught her outside bare-headed. And being the jerk he was, he took a photo in order to bring her down.
She shuddered to recall the night she’d exited the library and he’d all but accused her of cheating during the underwater exercise. The confrontation had unnerved her and caused her to doubt herself. It was Jancey who’d assured her then she’d done nothing wrong, but for all Mila knew, Brandon had taken his concerns to Zion, since she’d supervised the test. Now he was taking them to Sir Charles.
One thing she remembered with crystal clarity was seeing him outside his habitat when she first stepped out. It pissed her off to think he just happened to have a camera and telephoto lens at the very moment she appeared without her helmet. He probably carried it with him all the time just waiting to catch her.
Or what if all of it was a setup?
It was perfectly rational to believe he had it in for her. Even though it supposedly had been authenticated, Brandon was too smart to get caught Photoshopping. He could have tweaked the time stamp on a photo that was taken before the analog ever started.
“I need to figure this out,” she said.
Jancey rolled her eyes dramatically and continued to pack.
Mila grabbed her shoulders and forced her to pay attention. “Seriously. If I did this, I’ll take full responsibility. But I need to be sure.”
“You can’t take full responsibility, Mila. You can only take half, and I have to take the other half. And you know what? I’m not even angry at you. I’m angry at myself. Protocols matter in space. Even the smallest mistake can kill you, and it was my job to check you. I let sex get in the way of that. I knew all along we needed to focus, and I didn’t. I let down my guard to satisfy my stupid libido. Whatever happens to us, I deserve it. We deserve it.” She jerked her shoulders free and stomped into the bathroom to collect her toiletries.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. But I’m not going to sit on a stage smiling and clapping for somebody else when it should have been me.”
“Yes, you will, Jancey. You can’t throw a tantrum for the whole world to see and then expect people to respect you. The Tenacity Project is bigger than us. It’s Mars! Besides, you don’t know yet what the board will decide. They might only bump us down, but we’ll still get to go. Fourth is better than not going at all. If you don’t believe me, ask Marlon.” A risky thing to say, since right now Jancey probably was wishing she’d chosen him instead.
Jancey stopped abruptly and sat in a heap on the bed, looking as though she might cry. “I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life. I’m not going to apologize for that.”
“You don’t have to. I’ve never wanted anything more than to go into space with you, and I’m not going to give that up. No matter how long that takes, we’ll make it happen.” She summoned every ounce of courage to join her on the bed, ever so slowly drawing her into a hug.
Jancey resisted at first, stiffening at her touch. Then gradually she relaxed, laying her head on Mila’s shoulder. She allowed herself one sob before straightening and pulling away.