My mind was racing with so many thoughts and worries I awakened during sleep time, certain I was hearing voices in my head. I wanted to tune in, listen to what they were trying to tell me, but drifted back to sleep. Just me being me, all anxious and stirred, until these kinetic thoughts gave way to the eerie, still feeling someone was in the room with me. Captain Gillory and I slept at different times—I was probably still on my circadian Earth clock—and I was alone with whomever—or whatever—it was.
I opened my eyes and watched the slender sleep station door that separated me from “out there.” Should I unzip my bag? How about the stock, “Hello? Is anyone there?” that announces a potential victim’s vulnerable presence in every slasher flick? I won’t hear footsteps: My presumptive assailant was floating. Shit. Heart rate rising. Mouth drying. Knife. I was thinking knife. Did I have a knife? Did he—it—have a knife? I didn’t think he’d use a gun because a bullet penetrating the hull would depressurize us. So I envisioned a stabbing and airborne blood droplets instead of a forensics-friendly spatter pattern (how would a zero-G detective work?) I was whistling past the graveyard now, thinking distracting thoughts while I grasped the sleeping bag zipper and letting the ventilation and air systems provide cover noise, zipped it down far enough to get free. I avoided jiggling the door. I reached down, turned the handle, and…
And the door was already open! Shit! You can’t open these doors from outside without a code, and they lock automatically when closed. Didn’t I close it? Maybe it didn’t latch. And maybe the car won’t start, either. Slasher, slasher, fly away home. I pushed the door open and peered, gripping the handle in case I needed to slam it shut. I pulled my feet up and tried to get as high as I could, naively planning to just float over the “presence.” A high float seemed better than a low one. I emerged crazy wary. Looked left, peered right, proceeded straight. Heartbeat crazy. But there was nothing out here. Wait. That’s messed up. My hygiene kit, a four-foot tall line of covered pouches attached to the wall, was unstrapped and airborne.
I told the crew at breakfast.
“We don’t exactly have prowler problems up here,” Hightower said. “Just nerves, maybe? Happens on a maiden voyage.”
“Something—someone, some presence—was in our room.”
“I have an alibi,” Hightower said.
“I shouldn’t have one,” Gillory said. “If I’d have been there—”
“I don’t have an alibi, but I do have suspicions,” Ryong said.
“Like what?” Gillory asked.
“What do you think?”
“Randi?” I said.
“Don’t say that too loud,” Hightower said.
I thought he was kidding. But his face didn’t show it.
Ryong checked his onboard handheld. “Beacon log says Randi hasn’t moved from the chaise,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “But Randi can turn all that off.”
“Don’t remind me,” Hightower said.
“You’ve never said what happened with him,” Ryong said to Hightower. “Need-to-know basis? Seems we need to know.”
“Jennifer might have been having a nightmare,” Hightower said.
“No way,” I said.
“I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions.”
“Rob,” Gillory said. “I don’t even know the full story.”
“I’d settle for the half story,” Ryong added.
“Can we not get into this until I’ve at least had time to check in with JPL?” Hightower said. “We rely on Randi. He is our lifeline.”
“Thought he was just a—what did you call him—payload grunt?” Ryong said.
“They won’t send the Space Chaise without a pilot,” Hightower said. “And all we’re hearing anymore is how AI will take us to Mars. Robots. Androids. The political winds are at his back.”
Concerns dismissed. Very unsatisfying. Little Sister Syndrome had become Little Miss Tough Shit. Not being one to stew in my own blues, I put it out of my mind and got back to work. My conclusion was simple: I had no idea what was going on with the caviagar. The containers had the same lot numbers. The solid agar looked the same and even tasted the same (salty). Plus, I suffered no ill effects after touching it to my tongue.
“All the more reason to get Crimsy down here stat,” Brando said. “If we can’t trust the growth matrix up there, we risk killing her off entirely.”
“She grows on bare glass,” Shonstein said later. “What about dumping the agar entirely?”
So I tried sub-culturing on bare glass. No grow. Crimsy must have the ability to colonize the glass as an adult bacti only. Kind of like the ability to move away from home, to a new and cool and different place, on reaching that magical plateau called adulthood (or so I thought until reaching it).
There was no way around this simple fact: I couldn’t subculture anymore. I shouldn’t run any more tests, for fear it wasn’t the agar—or only the agar. Oh uncertainty, the bane of discovery. Our best course of action would be to put Crimsy in a deep freeze, until such time as the powers that be validated her passport. Survival, as it always does, trumped everything else.
“There’s no way to cryo-preserve up there, right?” Levitt said at a hastily convened staff meeting.
“Nope. Just basic refrigeration,” Shonstein said.
Cryo-preservation is probably the best long-term bacterial storage method: freezing the colonies in liquid nitrogen at -196°C or gaseous nitrogen at -150°C. And since loving cold was already in Crimsy’s last name—cryophilus—she’d probably do well in the deep freeze.
“Freeze drying?” Levitt asked. Also known as lyophilization, this method pulls the moisture content out of a bacterial culture, allowing refrigerated storage for years.
“Too risky,” Brando said. “Whatever we tried up there would be jury-rigged anyway.”
“How much glycerol do you have, Jen?” Shonstein said. It was a stabilizing agent that kept ice crystals off preserved cultures, in case we figured out a way to preserve Crimsy.
“One small bottle with each of the two inoculating kits,” I said.
“Not enough.”
“What are you thinking?” Levitt asked.
“We might could get a few months refrigerated storage if we used glycerol,” Shonstein said.
“Charade,” Marcum blurted out.
“Bill.”
“What about hijacking the Space Chaise and bringing Crimsy home with it?” Cooper said. “I’ll gladly plot your weather map.”
It was starting to dawn on me why Randi was really here, why XYZ Corporate Consortium insisted on having a pilot aboard a fully-automated spacecraft. “It’s guarded by something that can kill you with its facial expressions,” I said. “Really.”
“Saw Brandy almost wet himself when this thing made a
face,” Shonstein said.
My soap was missing. My pure glycerol soap. I went to take a shower, such as they are in orbit, and every bar I brought from home had vanished from my hygiene kit. I decided to say nothing and investigate on my own. I floated down the corridor toward the Space Chaise airlock. I needed to make sure the shuttle was pressurized before I entered and if not, suit up and go in. Randi could sleep in there indefinitely with or without air pressure. Huge advantage over us mere mortals. Gauges outside the chaise airlock indicated full pressure, so I took a deep breath and opened the hatch. I saw Randi’s arm and a sliver of his silhouette in the front seat.
Should I just say, “Randi, Did you take my soap? I’m sure you’d rust if you bathed, so why would you do such a thing?” Instead, I looked around. Cabinets. Cubbies. Luggage compartments. Under the rear seats. Behind the air handling nodes. I swept my hand along the stainless steel trim near the ceiling. Rear compartment seemed clear. Now—super deep breath—to the front cabin. I moved in, peering around to my seat.
“You shouldn’t be in here.”
I jumped and would have hit my head in normal gravity. The female voice again. What if Randi heard it? “You’re assignment is to take Crimsy home. That’s all.”
Home. At least we agreed on something. I wanted to get out of here and confront whatever was speaking. But I was determined to find that soap.
“I can wake him and if I do, he’ll kill you,” the voice said.
Over soap?
“All I have to do is give one command,” mama chided.
Mama. During the trip here, that Genesis song scrolled by on my helmet visor, too. The name stuck.
“You’re strong, but you’re no match for Randi,” mama said.
Okay—enough. I was out of here. No soap that I could see, and I had no desire to play a disgusting game of “hide the soap” in Randi’s lap.
“I think Randi stole my soap,” I told the crew at dinner.
“Your soap?” Captain Gillory asked.
“Hope it’s deodorant,” Captain Hightower said.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I think he came into our room and took it out of my hygiene kit.”
“I don’t get it,” Gillory said. “Why would he steal soap?”
“It’s pure glycerol,” I said. “It might be used to preserve Crimsy. Someone wants Crimsy dead.”
“Now I really don’t get it,” Gillory said.
“We’ve traced those brown spots to bad agar,” I said. “Probably contaminated. We didn’t requisition any agar, but it came with us anyway and I can’t tell the good from the bad.”
“How would he know your soap could be used as a preservative?” Ryong asked.
“The voice,” I said. “It was badgering me in the chaise. It says it can control Randi.”
They looked at each other.
“You were telling me about that,” Ryong said. “We don’t have anything other than AL on board that speaks.”
“I’ve never even heard AL,” Gillory said. “And I hope I never have to.”
“Any chance this voice is some kind of covert or cloaked operating system?” Ryong asked.
“Or dedicated OS. Just to Randi,” Gillory said.
“A CloudSpark special,” Ryong said.
“If it’s dedicated to Randi, why do I hear it?”
“Rob?” Gillory asked.
“He’s a necessary evil,” Hightower said. “Something’s gotta control him. We sure as hell don’t.”
Nathaniel Hawthorn had no idea how good it was to hear from him and see his handsome face. “Coop let me in,” he said from the PAB conference room, the only authorized communication line outside JPL. Dr. Cooper leaned in with a wacky grin.
“Don’t photo bomb me, bruh,” Nathaniel said.
Cooper did it again.
“What’s going on?” Nathaniel asked. “I heard someone broke into your room, stole your stuff. And Crimsy’s sick.”
I thought about this. I stared at Nathaniel and Alonzo.
“Jennifer?” Nathaniel asked. On the off chance mama could hear but not see, I grabbed some paper and wrote on it with a Sharpie. I held it up to the monitor.
“I think I’m in trouble,” it said. “Don’t talk.”
They rustled up a pen—forgot how hard that was—and responded.
“What’s wrong?”
And so began a silent action plan that ended with a surprise.
“The Randroid harms a hair on your head, and I’ll kill the sonuvabitch,” Nathaniel wrote.
I tossed and turned trying to force myself to sleep while Gillory stood watch in our own jury-rigged grammock outside my sleeping pod. Hightower and Ryong came and went, while I battled my conscience. Was I doing the right thing? Was I paranoid and over-reacting? Would I screw up the most important scientific expedition maybe ever, with the rash behavior for which my mother once hated me? It wasn’t until dad died that we started to patch things up, as I mended in the hospital and convalesced at home. Car (and pickup truck) accidents do that: make you a lot less rash. I presented my team’s plan to my crew at breakfast. We whispered, at my insistence. They still didn’t believe me about mama.
“I’m beginning to agree it would be a good idea if you returned,” Gillory said. “But this seems—”
“Rash?” I asked.
“I mean, how is JPL gonna take it?”
“I can’t go back in the chaise,” I said. “I won’t go back in the chaise. Not with Randi.”
“Maybe leave him here,” Ryong said.
“Oh goddammit no,” Hightower said.
“Other option is an Orion crew module,” Ryong said. “But if your theory is correct—that someone very high up is now trying to kill your discovery after imprisoning it up here for so long—where you gonna splashdown? We’ve got seven different government partners all with naval fleets. Telos and Sparks have yachts the size of small islands.”
“No doubt stocked with lawyers, guns, and money,” Hightower added.
“Somebody has to pick you up, so you can’t land too far off shore,” Gillory said. “They’d have you surrounded before you could stick your head out the capsule.”
I grimaced. I hadn’t thought about all that. “Anyway to land on land that they didn’t mention at JSC?”
“Only the service modules,” which don’t carry humans, “and the chaise,” Ryong said. “Splashdown is the only other option.”
The splashdown sim sucked. And that was only from a few meters up.
“I’ll look into the soap thing,” Hightower said. “Maybe it’ll be the final straw.”
I was carrying a pile of heat-resistant blankets when Ryong floated up in the corridor and grabbed an errant end unfolding behind me. “Where you taking those?” he asked.
“Evac module.”
He shook his head and redirected me.
“Your man Cooper and I are working on some ideas,” he said. “Gotta get JPL on board, too. Don’t want them crying mutiny.” We took the blankets to the crew module I shared with Captain Gillory, only all her stuff was packed.
“She’s moving,” Ryong said.
“Keep mama guessing, eh?” I said.
“And Randi.”
“Why do they keep him?”
“Manned Mars mission. Rob finally spilled that Randi is the prototype landing vehicle. The thing with his eyes is supposedly about keeping dust off the lenses, not weaponry. Wink, wink, pardon the pun.” We stuffed the blankets into a cabinet and Ryong looked around. “Brings back old memories,” he said. “First time I defected. I was so nervous. It was night, dark. And I knew—” He stopped.
“You defected?” I asked.
“More than once,” he said.
I looked suitably amazed.
“First time, North to South. Second time, South to North, only it wasn’t a defection then. It was a homecoming.” He took a deep breath. “Defection is mutiny against country, in most cases one man, one woman at a time. Too small to notice, usually. In my case, bigger. They called me the Great Red Hope. But for a trip to Mars, not a political platform.”
I looked at him. “You trained for a landing?”
“Oh hell no. Just the flying. No more foreign soil for me.” He smiled, with great affection, I thought. “I know what it’s like to leave home and I know how it aches to miss it,” he said. “My family, my parents, my brothers and sisters. My leader. My country. My self.”
“Too bad the rover’s not still up there,” Shonstein wrote, in the now-routine silent part of our meetings. “You could get the coolers off that.”
The MarsMicro rover had long ago returned to Earth for reuse, of course, which left us struggling with how to transport Crimsy. We needed the equivalent of a cat carrier for bacteria. We had dry ice and the heat blankets as an extra shield during re-entry (the way these blankets deflected heat was allegedly amazing) but so far, nothing to carry Crimsy.
Dr. Cooper explained—generally, in case mama was listening—how a special type of high, thin cloud, the noctilucent cloud, had become the gold standard of liftoff and landing weather windows. We learned some basics about these clouds—the highest on Earth—in training. Made of water crystals and visible only in the deepest darkness, noctilucent clouds were lighthouses for astronauts. Cooper filled us in on the finer details of their importance in trip timing and route planning.
I had a few more details to handle, things to move, lists to check off. I learned there was mixed opinion about Randi at JPL. The idea he might have gone rogue and poisoned the caviagar seemed to be favored over a more sinister conspiracy theory, that he was a closeted saboteur working for a rogue mission partner. That he was up here at all was also a source of discomfiture for certain coal mine canaries at NASA, including an engineer who had “defected” from SpaceTek. Talk was starting about bringing him back in an empty Space Chaise, then sending it back with a real human pilot for me. But only for me. Crimsy was still absent from that discussion.