The incident on the Muninn put everybody aboard our ship on edge for a couple of weeks. Inga had used parts from the backup water purifier to upgrade the main one. If it failed again they’d be screwed. Purifying the polluted water was going to take time because it had to be triple filtered, tested, and filtered again. And like I said, they were now more than halfway through their store of antibiotics.
You see, bacterial infections weren’t supposed to be a big thing. Mars probably doesn’t have bacteria, and even if it does it wasn’t likely to get into our food and water. Everything there would be filtered, and the heavy-duty filtering equipment was already there, sent on the unmanned ships. There were more antibiotics and other medical supplies waiting for us, of course, but they were on the planet. Each ship had enough water for two additional months beyond the journey. Now the Muninn was coasting on the edge and they might have to go down to half rations by the time we made it to Mars.
One day over lunch Nirti asked Zoé, “Why can’t we just send some of our water and supplies over to them?”
Zoé stared at her as if she’d asked why we couldn’t go outside the ship and sunbathe. “You’re joking, right?”
“No. The Muninn’s right there!”
“It’s not ‘right there’; it’s two hundred kilometers off the starboard bow.” When Nirti looked blank, Zoé took a mustard packet and set it in the air in front of her. Then she placed a ketchup packet to the right side and about a yard away. “The ships are not under power,” she explained. “Remember, we’re like rocks thrown—”
“At Mars,” finished Nirti. “I know. But we have engines. And we have retro jets and all that. Couldn’t they slow down and let us catch up and then we can send someone over in an EMU with supplies?”
“You don’t understand the physics,” said Zoé.
“Maybe not as well as you, but I know it’s possible.”
Zoé said, “Sure, it’s possible, but it’s incredibly risky. If we slow the Muninn there’s a risk of interfering with its planned trajectory. A thousandth of a degree off here could make them miss Mars completely. Or they’d have to burn fuel to correct. And to get the ships within EVA distance is very dangerous. There’s only a few hundred meters of cable, and whoever’s doing the space walk would be taking a terrible risk. No . . . it’s too dangerous.”
Nirti folded her arms and stared at Zoé. “So what you’re saying is that we’re not smart enough to figure it out, even if it would mean saving the lives of twenty people? Wow. So much for supergeniuses.”
And before Zoé could stop sputtering long enough to come up with a reply, Nirti pushed off and floated away.