Sol 315, Tithonium Chasma, B-site – V Meier
“Make it smaller.”
“Excuse me?” said Stefanie.
“It’s the only way we can do it faster,” answered Verena. “We spent years working out how to make erection faster because we knew our lives would depend on it. The habs are great temporary shelters: we’ll have enough of them here to keep us alive while building the dome, but you can’t plant a big enough volume of crops in them to feed us all. There’s too many of us to do a Mark Watney!”
“Who?”
“You need to read more, Stef.”
“But if we make the dome smaller, we’ll run out of crops sooner.”
“We only have half the people to feed, so we can make it half the floor area: that’ll be about two thousand eight hundred metres across, instead of four thousand.”
“I thought the idea was that we could feed the others when Tharsis falls down?”
“They’ll have to salvage their own emergency supplies, to keep them going while we expand for them.”
“Expand?”
“We designed the domes so that we can link them together.”
“Okay, so how long will it take to build a dome half the size?”
“Time won’t decrease proportionally to floor area. The longest part is the anchorages. I reckon about sixty sols.”
Stefanie just looked blank.
“What’s wrong?” asked Verena.
“We’ll have starved to death before the crops can be harvested.”
“By how many sols?”
“Twenty.”
“We need to build the dome twenty sols faster?”
“Yes.”
“Sheiβe!”
Sol 316, Tithonium Chasma, B-site – J Wojcik
Most of the temporary habs were inflated and they would put the link tunnels in tomorrow. Santiago and Charlie had been working with Verena to set the dome site out with datum levels and radial markers for the anchorages. Johanna led Jan to a promising cave that she and Verena had found on their first visit, located at the bottom edge of the site, and hidden among the rock formations. They had brought what little mining equipment they managed to take from Tharsis: a mobile drill, a spoil wagon, and the walker. It took ninety-five sols for Jan to strike a worthwhile seam of ice at Tharsis. He paused a moment, at the edge of the narrow split in the rocks, to pray that he would find ice sooner in Tithonium.
“Are you okay?” asked Johanna.
“Fine.”
“Why did you stop and close your eyes?”
“I was praying.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“I didn’t know you were religious. Come to that, I didn’t think any of the colonists were. I thought Mission Control deliberately avoided candidates with a faith.”
“I keep my faith to myself.”
“It’s okay, your secret is safe with me,” Johanna said, smiling.
“It isn’t a secret I just don’t go telling everyone. Most people wouldn’t understand.”
“I can’t say I do, but it doesn’t bother me.”
“That’s about as positive a reaction as I can hope for.”
“That’s sad.”
“Yes, faith used to be something to be respected.”
“I guess religious leaders shouldn’t be surprise about loss of respect after centuries of war and abuse.”
“Religious leaders are people. People can misuse religion as a tool for their own ends: exclusion, greed, hate. God knows they have no real faith. God knows who does.”
“Does your god know where the ice is?”
“Not necessarily, but he knows who to send to help find it.”
“Who?”
He smiled. “You.”
Johanna led Jan through a zigzag of boulders, under the lip of a rocky overhang and into a small cave. He was about to express doubts when she kept going into a tunnel at the back of the cave and so he stooped and walked after her, wondering if there might be a little more to it than his first impressions. About fifty metres down the tunnel, he found that he could straighten up again. It took a few moments for his eyes to focus in the gloom. When they did, he almost fell over.
Sol 316, Tithonium Chasma, B-site temporary habs – V Meier
“Can you make two domes at once?” asked Antonio. “One small and one large?”
“We could, but it would slow us down,” answered Verena. “Why?”
“Because if the small one was finished first then we could start a portion of the crop early. Enough to bridge the gap between the end of rations and the main crop harvest.”
“I see, how big an area would you need?”
“About two-hundred and fifty square metres per person.”
“Just over eleven-thousand square metres,” pondered Verena. “Ah… that would need a dome about a hundred and twenty metres across. That’s going to be a lot smaller and quicker than three kilometres.”
“By the time we have the big one producing, we can be re-sowing the small one.”
“And we can build more of them, in a ring around the main one. That’ll allow us to feed people from Tharsis when we need to.”
“And it will give us some protection through redundancy: more domes, so harder for all of them to fail at once.”
“Are you sure you weren’t an architect in a previous life, Antonio?”
He allowed himself a thin smile and studied Verena. “I suspect you’ll make a good colony leader in this life. I think you should talk to Cathal. Leaders need all the support they can get.”
Verena nodded. She knew she had been avoiding Cathal since they arrived, which was exceedingly difficult in a group of forty-five colonists working on a construction site together and sharing a handful of habs. Somehow, she had managed to be up planning while he was asleep, then grabbing a quick rest when he was out working with the others. Verena knew it couldn’t go on and was ashamed that Antonio had to remind her. She found Cathal in one of the communal habs taking his meagre ration of hydrated rice. He looked up and she could see he was in pain.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
Verena wanted to hug him, but she was still angry.
“I understand why you’re doing this,” he continued. “But it’s my job to say something when the unity of the colony is threatened.”
“I wasn’t threating it. I was trying to save it.”
“Yes, and all I was asking for was more time.”
“We don’t have any. I’ve just been with Antonio, working out how to build something in time to stop us all starving to death.”
“We would have had more time if we’d stayed longer at Tharsis.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Santiago said it was unlikely to fall down immediately.”
“Santiago was trying not to alarm anyone. You weren’t there when he read the survey report from Johanna. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him react like that before.”
“But surely there’s nothing to make the faults grow unless we have another storm?”
“Do you know when the next storm will be?”
“No but…”
“Then don’t question what I’m doing.” Verena put her helmet back on and stalked to the airlock. She waited until the door had closed and the hiss of decompression covered her scream of frustration. She thumped the airlock wall with balled fists and sobbed. She had messed that up again.
Verena was hoping to find a corner of Tithonium to disappear into, but Stef met her coming out and could see her crying. You can’t cuff away the tears in an EVA suit.
“Hey! Verena, what’s up?” she put her arm around Verena and led her over to a rock to sit.
“Cathal,” choked Verena.
“Ah, yeah. You know that you’re both right, don’t you?”
“Yes, but we had to choose. Bulman made us choose.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to lose Cathal.”
“I AM losing him!”
“No, you’re having a hard time, but you’ll get through it.”
“We’re all having a hard time, trying to stay alive. Our relationship is irrelevant compared to that.”
“I may be the senior officer here at Tithonium, but people are looking to you for guidance, Verena. Their survival depends on your construction leadership…”
“I thought you were trying to make me feel better.”
“… and so, we all need you and Cathal to kiss and make up.”
“That sounds more like a threat than help.”
“It’s the truth. And so’s this: he loves you. He’s in pain because every time he does his job, he pushes your buttons and drives you away. You can’t alter what’s happened, but you can ask for his help to build a bridge with Tharsis.”
Verena thought about it. Stef had a good point, but it felt harder building a bridge to Cathal again, than building one with Tharsis.
“Could you…”
“No! It has to come from you, Verena.”
Charlie came running across the dusty bowl of Tithonium Chasma towards them. “Hey! Ice! Jan and Johanna have struck ice!”
“Already?” asked Stef. “They only started this morning!”
Charlie skidded to a stop, raising a plume of red dust around her. “Tonnes of it,” she managed in between pants of filtered and oxygenated air. “In a massive cavern. Johanna reckons… that it’s so deep down… there’s just enough pressure for… water vapour to form and… freeze again overnight.”
“So, it’s just lying there in a cave, waiting for us to take it?” asked Stefanie.
“Yep. They’re lifting it out… by the wagon load. Only problem… is where to put it.”
“Find Trish and Sam,” said Verena. “Ask them to figure out how we can stockpile it without it subliming.”
Charlie looked at Verena more carefully. “Are you okay, Verena?”
“Fine. At last, something’s going right for us.”
Sol 317, Tithonium Chasma, B-site – J Wojcik
The cavern that Johanna found was beyond all imagination. Jan reckoned you could build a cathedral down there and still have room for another one on top. If Johanna hadn’t grabbed his hand he might have fallen over the precipice. She took a pair of glow-sticks and dropped them. Judging by the time it took for them to stop falling the drop must have been over a hundred metres. Peering over the edge he could see that the yellow light of the sticks was being reflected by something other than rock or dust.
“Ice,” said Johanna.
“My god!” exclaimed Jan. “It’s just lying there, waiting for us to scoop it up. No drilling, no cutting, just pick it off the floor, assuming we find a way down there.”
“Look,” she pointed to their left. A natural ramp had formed where one seam of rock had shifted over another. They could walk all the way down there without even deploying ropes and lifting gear, though that would speed things up once they got going. “It seems your god was listening,” she said.
Jan looked Johanna in the eye. “Yes. Like I said, he sent you to guide us.”
Sol 318, Tithonium Chasma, B-site – J Wojcik
Jan was impressed. Bulman almost had him thinking that the second team were full of useless academics and pen-pushers. It was true that the first team had far more technicians, but each time he emerged from the ice cave, as Johanna called it, he saw a busy site alive with builders. Okay, so Santiago was showing Bim and Georges how to drive screw piles and Verena was teaching Stef and Sofia how to bolt the central eye-ring components together. But that was impressive too, because it showed that the people who designed it could also build it and show other people how.
Despite the buzz, he couldn’t help wondering whether all these trainee builders would be much slower than the skilled technicians who built A-site. They all knew it was a race and you must train hard to run and win a race, yet these people were still learning to walk.
Jan bumped into Charlie as she was coming out of a hab airlock. Literally, because she was staggering under a pile of boxes full of bolts and couldn’t see him. The boxes toppled, and shiny steel bolts scattered into the dirt.
“Shit! Sorry Charlie!”
“That’ll teach me not to overload. Come on, you can help me pick ‘em all up again.”
They both started grovelling and picking out the bolts. At least they were easy to see.
“This is the last thing you need when we’re so short of time,” apologised Jan.
“We’ll make it,” she answered casually, face down plucking bolts.
“You think so?”
“Verena’s not bad for an architect.”
“’For an architect?’ What does that mean?”
“They’re not always known for being practical. She is. She knows what she’s doing and she’s making sure everyone else does too.”
“Do you think it’s because she has special training?”
Charlie sat up on her haunches. She was smothered in red dust, like a child playing in a sand pit, and he guessed that he must be too. She looked at him over her shoulder with a mischievous smile. “No, it’s because she’s a woman.”
Jan conceded the point gracefully, though it proved another to him. Even as Charlie’s sense of humour was irrepressible, the humour of everyone at Tithonium seemed to have improved considerably, now they were away from the strangling atmosphere of Tharsis. What they lacked in skill they seemed to make up for in motivation. They didn’t just want to survive, they wanted to live.
Sol 319, Tithonium Chasma, B-site – V Meier
Verena felt heavy. No, not heavy, she felt as if she carried a momentum that took extra strength to move or stop. As if she didn’t have enough to deal with, her growing belly was tiring her. Mars pulled on her at less than half Earth’s gravity but carrying a baby was still hard work and she wondered with some admiration how women coped on Earth. Sofia kept telling her to ease off, so Verena kept distracting Sofia with lessons on how to thread cables. No one could afford to sit it out, not even the physicists. Verena found Trish and Sam arguing over how to use the piling rig for the small dome anchorages.
“Why are you measuring the angle of the rig, Sam?” asked Trish, her hands on her hips.
“The pile has to be aligned with the direction of force from the cables,” said Sam, peering at the inclinometer on his laser measure.
“The instruction manual says we can programme the rig,” Trish waved her wrist-pad with the relevant page on screen. “We don’t have to set the angle up manually.”
“Yes, but surely we should check it, we don’t want any errors creeping in.”
“The manual says it will guide itself.”
“The person who wrote the manual wasn’t depending on it for their life. And they didn’t explain what these canisters are for.” Sam pointed to a large metal cylinder lying beside the rig.
“I don’t think it will make that much difference if we’re out of alignment by point-zero-something of a degree.”
“What? You’re kidding, aren’t you? That kind of error could make a huge difference, even over a few metres!”
“I admire your diligence,” said Verena, having listened quietly for a little without either of them noticing. “But Trish is right, it won’t make enough difference to affect the dome.”
“But…” Sam stood up and looked at Verena, open mouthed.
“And be careful with that canister, it has an emergency explosive charge in it.”
“What?”
“This is construction, Sam, not astrophysics. A tiny error of alignment could cause a huge mistake when measuring far away stars, but I’d be impressed if we have the anchorages positioned to the nearest twenty millimetres.”
“Twenty! That’s huge!” exclaimed Sam.
“It’s a building, not a Swiss watch. You know about tolerances, don’t you?”
“Wish he’d be a bit more tolerant with me,” muttered Trish. Sam glared at her.
“How about you let Trish manage the rig, Sam?” Verena suggested. “I have another job for you.”
“But I thought this was a two-person job?” he argued.
“Trish will manage fine,” she gave Trish a wink. “I need you to talk to Antonio and help figure out a way to maximise the use of crop growing space in this dome.”
“I don’t know anything about crops, I’m a physicist!”
“And a mathematician who knows how to analyse different patterns and Konfigurationen? Thank you, configurations. Besides, we cannot afford to be one label here: we’re colonists and so we have to be able to do everything.”
Verena jumped as she felt a kick inside her tummy. Leo was making his presence known. She wondered how Martian gravity would affect him and whether he was he being exposed to too much radiation. It was not the first time she had thought about the risks of having a baby on another planet. There had been plenty of briefings on what the Mars mission consultants thought would be risks, and they stressed their opinion that the risks were relatively low. She had been able to put such thoughts to the back of her mind, especially with all the other pressures on her. Leo’s first kick changed that.
Sol 323, Tithonium Chasma, B-site – J Wojcik
Jan found Verena, Sam and Antonio sitting at a table in the food hab, drawing patterns on a tablet.
“Are you having a game?” he asked.
“This is no game,” answered Antonio with a frown. “This is a survival plan.”
Jan peered at the tablet and Sam tipped it to reveal a three-dimensional arrangement of surfaces and lines. “3D farming,” he said simply.
“I don’t understand.”
“If you have a restricted area which is flat you can only ever plant so many crops on it. We can stack hydroponic planting trays and place them in east-west arrangements like this to maximise the sunlight to them all. The Aldrin’s biome was racked, so there’s no reason we can’t do it in the small dome.”
“It’s too intensive to be sustainable for any length of time,” said Antonio, “but it will bridge the gap between us running out of food and the crops in the main dome being ready. With Sam’s help we might be able to grow emergency rations for Tharsis as well.”
“Won’t the racks make it harder to plant and harvest?” Jan asked.
“Yes, but we can manage if we set up a mobile access platform,” said Antonio.
“Where will you get the parts for that?”
“We’ll do some trading with Tharsis,” said Verena. “Some of our ice for their raw materials. Then we can use our 3D printers to make the platform components.”
“Will they talk to us?”
“They won’t talk to me,” said Verena, “but they might talk to you and Cathal.”
Sol 324, In flight over Valles Marineras – J Wojcik
Jan decided to fly. He had called ahead and got a cool response from Voight, but he didn’t say to stay away. Cathal sat in one of the glider seats behind, the other seats were filled with pressurised water containers as evidence of their good intentions. It seemed to Jan that Verena wanted him to act as much an emissary to Cathal as the Tharsis colonists and he was forced to recognise her shrewd planning again, even if he didn’t feel up to either job. They could see the two dome sites laid out below as they rose above Tithonium. Two perfect circles: one large, one small.
“Verena seems to have us well organised,” offered Jan, cautiously.
Cathal grunted and looked sullenly out of the cabin.
“Bulman didn’t give us much choice,” Jan added and braced himself for an argument. He was surprised by Cathal’s answer.
“No, he didn’t at that. The only choice we had was whether to stay or go.”
“Do you think we made the right choice?”
“Yes. I only wish everyone had made the same choice, so.”
“Bulman was never going to come,” said Jan.
“He’d have had to if everyone else left.”
“Why do you think so many stayed?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking meself for the past twelve sols. Some of the first team admire Bulman, trust his judgement. Some of them are a little afraid of him. But I think it’s more than yer man, I think it’s the way this whole mission was set up in the first place.”
“What do you mean?”
“How well do you know me, Jan?”
“I know you’re from Dublin, that you studied at Trinity College, you’re the colony psychologist, that you and Verena are expecting a baby.”
“Do you know I was born in Cork, but grew up in Raheny?”
“Where’s Raheny?”
“Exactly! And did you know the reason I moved to Raheny in north Dublin was because my father was an alcoholic and so my mam took me and my two sisters away to raise us by herself? No. And I’ll tell you why you don’t know that. It isn’t because I don’t talk about it, it’s because we never had a chance to talk about it. I can count the number of weeks we trained together on my fingers. We trained so hard as separate teams that when they sent us all here the teams hardly knew each other. Hardly cared about each other. Jesus, they even sent us on separate ships, seven months apart! Of course it was easy for the second team to go leave the first team. What was hard was trying to keep us together in the first place!”
Jan was quiet, taking in what Cathal said.
“I’m sorry, Jan,” he said, lowering his voice again after his outburst. “I’m sorry I don’t know you any better than you know me. And I’m sorry we took you away from your friends in the first team.”
“I’m not sorry,” he said, calmly. “I’m where I need to be.”
“What makes you say that?” Cathal asked, curious.
“Water on Mars means life on Mars. It’s my job to help us get water and so I’m in the right place.”
“That’s very pragmatic, but surely you have feelings about who you’d rather be with?”
“No,” he answered, though he wasn’t entirely sure he was being honest. He knew it would have been harder if one friend hadn’t come with him from Tharsis. “I suppose if I cared that much, I wouldn’t be millions of miles away from Earth. I’m okay with my own company, but I’ve been enjoying getting to know a few of your team as well.”
“What do you think of us?”
“Not bad for a bunch of academics,” he smirked, then paused, serious again. “I’m sorry about your dad, Cathal.”
“Thanks. I’m not. We grew up and apart. He was too busy thinking about himself and where his next drink would come from. We just got on with our lives.”
“Do you miss him?”
“He’s my da, so it hurts, but I try not to dwell on it. I put it in perspective, just as I’ve put leaving my mam and sisters behind into perspective. My future is here, so.”
“With Verena?” Jan asked, tentatively.
“Yes, with Verena.” He made a wry smile. “She’s a stubborn fecker, but I love her.”
The flight along the Valles Marineras was stunning. Whole mountain ranges at the valley floor, catching the light of the sun in a flicker of pale magentas and warm greys. Away to the north the dunes of Borealis basin looked like the Sahara. To the south the rugged uplands glowed in burnt umber. The barren expanse of the Martian landscape could feel as intimidating as it was uplifting. From here Jan found it inspiring. For a while it took his mind away from the task ahead. As they neared the landing strip his doubts about their reception returned.