Luka was supposed to be meeting Erik and the others for an early dinner, but instead was sitting on his own in the office they all shared, thinking about Gianni. Ever since his conversation with Anita near the asteroid crash site, he had been trying to make sense of why Gianni would have gone to the research station alone rather than try to fix the computer remotely. He wanted to ask Gianni what on Earth – or, rather, what on Mars – he had been doing. But Gianni was dead. The only ones who had been there and survived were the scientists. It made him want to find out more about them so he could put to them the questions he couldn’t ask Gianni.
Publicly available information on the scientists was sparse. There were only five on the initial team sent to begin work at the station, all of whom were specialists in biology and genetics. A statement from ThorGate issued at the time said they would be working on projects including adapting lichen suitable for early terraforming and experiments to harness the resilience of plants brought from the arctic regions of Earth. What happened to them after the asteroid had destroyed the research station was harder to discover and Luka, even though he had new security clearance, felt a stab of guilt as he faked credentials and hacked his way in using a false name to gain access to ThorGate’s staff records.
The database showed that three of the scientists had moved back to Tharsis City after the asteroid disaster where they appeared to be still employed by ThorGate although apparently not yet assigned to a new project. Two remained in Thor Town. One lived in an apartment on the opposite side of town to Luka and worked in a department developing future projects for the corporation. The other was Doctor David Kobayashi, who he had seen on ICN looking shell-shocked the day after the crash. What Doctor Kobayashi was subsequently employed to do wasn’t listed, which suggested either his work was too secret to be recorded at the level Luka had access to or, which seemed equally plausible, no one had got around to updating the system.
David’s personal life, however, was the complete opposite of secret, as he had made it publicly available for anyone who wanted to know. There were swathes of information about his romantic life, which seemed to involve a string of quickly dumped girlfriends, plus some details of his hobbies and interests. He was into martial arts, which had been somewhat of a family tradition after his great grandfather brought his skill from Japan to America and became a superstar within the karate world by winning several high-profile competitions.
Luka would have delved deeper, but the door to the office was flung open and Erik came in with the brazenness of a man unaware that he was disturbing anyone.
Luka jumped in his chair. “Erik, don’t you knock?”
“Not usually to enter my own office,” he said, heading for his desk which was perilously close to Luka’s. Luka surreptitiously entered a few commands into his computer and withdrew from the parts of the ThorGate network where he wasn’t strictly supposed to be. He erased the fake credentials, knowing he could never use them again.
Erik grabbed his bag from where he had left it under his chair. “I messaged you to say if you’re coming to the dining hall, can you bring my bag. Didn’t you get my messages?”
Luka had been too distracted. He hadn’t even noticed Erik’s bag was there. “Sorry, I was absorbed with work.”
“Why don’t you leave that now and join us for dinner?”
Luka thought about the information about Doctor David Kobayashi he had just read, but knew he wasn’t going to get much more done that evening. He wasn’t even sure there was much more he could do from the office, even if he kept rummaging around in the restricted parts of the ThorGate network. “OK,” he said, closing down his computer. “Although I’m not sure I’m that hungry yet.”
“Blame Pete,” said Erik. “He wanted to eat early because of his maternity class.”
“Maternity class?”
“Him and his wife are having a baby, didn’t you know?”
“I haven’t seen much of Pete, we’ve been working on other projects.”
“I suppose you haven’t. He must have made the big announcement before you started with us. She’s seven months into the pregnancy, I think.”
“Wow,” said Luka. “That’s a big decision to have children out here.”
“Having children is a big decision anywhere,” said Erik.
“But growing up in such reduced gravity, they might never be able to go to Earth.”
“If you’d been born here, would you seriously want to go to Earth with the way things are back there?”
“I think I’d want the option.”
Erik slung his bag over his shoulder and waited while Luka collected his own bag from under his desk.
“You wouldn’t have children on Mars, then?” asked Erik. “If you had the opportunity, I mean.”
Luka thought about Lena and Oskar. In his mind, they were still six and four, although if they had lived, Lena would be ten and Oskar would be coming up to his eighth birthday. “No, I don’t think I would have kids again.”
“You have children on Earth, then?”
“Not anymore,” said Luka, revealing the plain fact without accessing the emotion attached to it. “They died.”
“Oh, mate.” Erik’s face suddenly crumpled with sympathy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
Luka shrugged his concern away. “They were caught up in the Rhine Valley Disaster.”
“That awful chemical leak? I can’t imagine how terrible it must have been for you.”
The pain of the memory came back to him in a rush. Luka had thought he could tell his friend what happened to his family. He thought time and space had put enough distance between him and the horrific event so he was numb to the reality of his grief. But it was suddenly there again, the sense of loss, like a knife through his heart.
“How did you manage to survive?” asked Erik. “I thought the fumes were so bad that virtually no one in the surrounding towns was able to get out.”
“I wasn’t there when it happened, I was working in another part of the country. I didn’t have the chance to save them. Not my children. Not my wife.”
A silence fell between them and, in the absence of anything else, the memories returned.
It had been after a successful business meeting where he had secured a major new contract that an ashen-faced woman had taken him aside and suggested he find a quiet place to turn on the news. He remembered the confusion as the screen was filled with images of an unnatural fog hanging over the town of Königswinter. He could still feel the desperation as he tried to call his wife – then her work, the children’s school, their friends, their neighbors – and no one answered.
He could still taste the nausea as he watched from the comfort of an office building while firefighters in breathing apparatus staggered out of the toxic haze carrying the limp bodies of people who they lay on the ground where paramedics hopelessly tried to revive them. He was still chilled by the ice that burrowed its way into his heart as he was gripped by helplessness one hundred and fifty kilometers away in Frankfurt.
Someone from the office took him to the airport where he begged, shouted, and cried to be allowed onto a flight back home. There was the feeling of desolation as he sat on a plane shaking and crying while an air steward tried to serve him coffee and a small snack.
He rushed to be with his family, but he was barred from entering what was termed the “disaster zone” and no matter who he approached, who he threatened, or who he attempted to bribe, he couldn’t get through the guarded barriers hastily erected by the emergency services. The sleepless, anxious days that followed were lost in a haze of memory, but the calendar told him it was a week before a volunteer led him into a converted community hall to identify his wife and children. They had been laid out respectfully so it disguised the horror of what had happened. But he knew from the testimony of a few survivors that it had been a slow and agonizing death that began with a burning in the throat, then a searing in the lungs until they collapsed and convulsed while gasping their last breaths.
Erik didn’t seem to know what to say. There was nothing he could say. Nothing anyone could say.
“Perhaps we should, um… get to the dining hall,” said Erik eventually. “The others will be waiting for us.”
Luka blinked away the tears from his eyes. “Yeah,” he said.
He took the memories of the past which he had inadvertently set free, enclosed them back in the lead-lined box which he kept inside, and did his best to bury them two meters beneath the surface of his consciousness.
“I’ve actually got something to tell you which I think might cheer you up,” said Erik, resuming his breezy, carefree air. Not to undermine what Luka had told him, he was sure, but to relieve the tension.
Luka looked at him warily, trying to get back to the emotional place where he could exchange easy banter with his friend. “Why am I suddenly feeling nervous?”
“It’s nothing to feel nervous about. It turns out the coach for the ThorGate football team is a fellow Swede who traveled out to Mars with me. I’ve sent her a message – I’m sure I can get you a try out.”
“Erik…” The thought of socializing with a whole new team of people made him uneasy. “I’m not really interested.”
“Nonsense. We can talk about it over dinner – you can start an argument with Pete about whether it’s called soccer or football if you like.”
“OK,” said Luka, managing a smile at Erik’s silly joke.
“Good man,” said Erik, giving him a friendly slap on the back.
They made their way out of the office, into the street and towards the communal dining hall with Erik chatting about inconsequential things on the way. But even though Luka tried to bury them deep, the painful memories of what had happened to his family continued to burn inside of him. He still carried with him the guilt that he wasn’t with his wife and children when they had needed him most. It was a guilt he knew that, no matter what he went on to do with his life, would always be with him.