Alex Irvine writes books (Buyout, The Narrows, New York Collapse), games (Marvel Avengers Alliance, The Walking Dead: Road to Survival), and comics (DaredevilNoir, Deux Ex: Children’s Crusade). He lives in Maine.

 

 

 

NUMBER NINE MOON

Alex Irvine

They came in low over the abandoned colony near the eastern rim of Hellas Basin, deciding which landing spot gave them the best shot at hitting all the potential motherlodes in the least time. The Lift was just about done, and everything on this side of Mars was emptied out. The only people left were at the original colony site in the caldera of Pavonis Mons, and they would be gone inside twenty-four hours. Steuby, Bridget, and Marco figured they had twelve of those hours to work, leaving enough time to zip back to Pavonis Mons and pay for their passage back in-system on the freighter that was currently docked at the top of the Pavonis space elevator.

“Quick visit,” Marco said to no one in particular. “We’re just stopping by. Quick trip. Trips end. People go home. That’s what we’re doing, boys and girls. About to go home, live out our happy lives.” Steuby really wished Marco would shut up.

“That’s it right there,” Bridget said. She pointed at a landing pad on the edge of the settlement. “Close to the garage, greenhouse, that’s a lab complex. . . .”

“Yup,” Marco said. “I like it.”

He swung the lander in an arc over the settlement, bringing it back toward the pad. Nineteen years of work, people devoting their lives to establishing a human foothold on Mars, and now it was up in smoke because Earth was pulling the plug. It was sad, the way people were withdrawing. Steuby always wanted to think of human civilization like it was an eagle, but maybe it was more like a turtle. Now it was pulling its head in. Someday maybe it would start peering out again, but all this stuff on Mars would be junk by then. Everything would have to start over.

Or humanity would stay on Earth, and in a hundred years no one living would have ever set foot on Mars or the Moon or an asteroid.

“Shame,” Bridget said. “All that work for nothing.”

“I hate quitters,” Marco said.

Steuby didn’t mind quitters. He kind of admired people who knew when to quit. Maybe that was a function of age. He was older than both Bridget and Marco by a good twenty years. The older you got, the less interested you were in fighting battles you knew you couldn’t win.

But to be agreeable, he said, “Me, too.”

“They’re not quitting,” Bridget pointed out. “Earth quit on them.”

“Then I hate Earth,” Marco said. “Just kidding. That’s where I’ll end up, when I’m old.”

Nobody knew they were there, since what they were doing was technically illegal. The sun was going down, washing the landscape in that weird Martian blue dusk that made Steuby think he’d had a stroke or something every time he saw it.

“Time to see what the Lift left,” Marco said, for maybe the hundredth time since they’d taken off from PM. Steuby was ready to kill him.

Their collective guess was that the Lift had left all kinds of useful things. People always did when they had to get out in a hurry. In the thirty days since the Mid-System Planning Authority announced it was ending logistical support for all human activity beyond the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, everyone on Mars had started lining up to get off-planet and back under the MSPA umbrella. Even the asteroid miners, as antisocial and hardy a group as had existed since Vinland, were pulling back. Things on Earth were bad— refugee crises, regional wars over water and oil and room to breathe. When things on Earth got bad, everyone not on Earth was on their own. That wasn’t a big deal for the Moon settlements, which were more or less self-sufficient. Much different story for Mars.

“Are we sure nobody’s here?” Steuby wondered out loud. It would be kind of a drag to get arrested in the middle of a planet-wide evacuation.

“I listened to the MSPA comm all night,” Marco said. “Last people out of here were on their way to Pavonis before midnight.”

Since the easiest way off-planet was the space elevator at Pavonis Mons, that was where the remaining colonists were, hiding out in the caldera until it was their turn to go up. The Hellas Basin settlement, over which they were now circling, was completely deserted. It was newer than PM, so the pickings would probably be better here anyway. Steuby looked out the window. Mars looked different around here. The PM caldera felt like it was already halfway to space because it was so high and you could see so far from the rim, when the storms let you go out on the rim. The Hellas Basin settlement, built just a couple of years ago to take advantage of a huge water supply locked in glaciers on the basin’s eastern slope, was about as far from Pavonis Mons as you could get both geographically and environmentally. Practically antipodal. Where Pavonis was high, dry, and cold, Hellas was low, water-rich, and comparatively warm. Stormy during the summers, when the planet neared perihelion.

Which was now. There were dust devils everywhere, the atmosphere in the area was completely scrambled by magnetic auroras, PM was sucking itself up the space elevator as fast as it could get there, and here were Steuby, Marco, and Bridget thousands of klicks away at HB exploring. Well, prospecting. Okay, looting.

“We’re just here to plunder the mysteries, Ma’am,” Marco said to an imaginary cop, even though the auroras meant they couldn’t talk to any authorities whether they wanted to or not. He put the lander into its final descent and ninety seconds later they were parked on the surface of Mars. There was a sharp crack from below as the ship touched down.

“Nice going,” Steuby said. “You broke the pad.”

Marco shrugged. “Who’s gonna know? You find me a concrete slab on Mars that doesn’t have a crack in it. Steuby, what was it, ten years since we were here before?”

Steuby nodded. “Give or take.” He and Marco had worked a pipeline project on the lower slopes of Pavonis. Then he’d gone back in-system. He preferred the Moon. Real Martians wanted to get away from Earth. Steuby preferred to keep the Earth close by in case he needed it. “Bridget, you’ve been here before, right?”

“I built some of the solar arrays on the edge of the Pavonis caldera,” she said. “Long time ago. But this is my first time coming out to Hellas. And last, looks like.”

They suited up and popped the hatch. Bridget went first, Steuby right behind her, and Marco appeared in the hatchway a minute later, after doing a quick post-flight check on the lander’s engines. “Good morning, Barsoom!” he sang out.

Marco was three steps down the ladder when they all heard a grinding rumble from under the ground. Steuby felt the pad shift and scrambled backward. The lander started to tip as the concrete pad cracked and collapsed into a sinkhole that opened up right at Steuby’s feet. Marco lost his balance and grabbed at the ladder railing. The sinkhole kept opening up and the lander kept tipping. “Marco!” Bridget shouted. “Jump!”

He tried, but he couldn’t get his feet under him and instead he slipped, pitching off the ladder and falling into the sinkhole as the lander tipped right over on top of him. The whole scene unfolded in the strange slow motion of falling objects in Martian gravity, dreamlike and all the more frightening because even slowed down, the lander tipped too quickly for Marco to get out of the way. He disappeared beneath it as its hull scraped along the broken concrete slabs.

Before it had completely come to rest, Steuby and Bridget were clambering around the edge of the sinkhole, where large pieces of the concrete pad angled under the toppled lander. Steuby spotted him first, face down and not moving. He slid into the dust-filled space underneath the bulk of the lander, Bridget right next to him. Together they grabbed Marco’s legs and tried to drag him out, but he was caught on something. They could pivot him around but not pull him free. “Marco,” Bridget said. “Talk to me.”

The dust started to clear and Steuby saw why Marco wasn’t answering.

The ladder railing had broken off and part of it impaled Marco just inside his right shoulder blade. Blood welled up around the hole in his suit and ran out from under his body down the tilted concrete slab. Now Marco turned his head toward them. Dust covered his faceplate. He was moving his left arm and trying to talk, but his comm was out. His voice was a thin hum and they couldn’t understand what he was saying. A minute later it didn’t matter anymore because he was dead.

“Marco,” Steuby said. He paused, feeling like he ought to say something but not sure what. After a while he added, “Hope it didn’t hurt too much when we pulled on you. We were trying to help.”

Bridget had been sitting silently since Marco stopped moving. Now she stood up. “Don’t talk to him, Jesus, he’s dead! Don’t talk to him!”

Steuby didn’t say anything.

All he could figure was that there had been some kind of gas pocket under the landing pad, frozen hydrates or something. They’d sublimated away gradually from the sporadic heat of a hundred or a thousand landings, creating a soft spot, and when Marco set down their lander, that last little bit of heat had weakened the pad. Crack, tip, disaster.

“What are we going to do?” Bridget asked in a calmer tone. It was a reasonable question to which Steuby had no good answer. He looked around. They were at the edge of a deserted settlement on Mars. The only other people on Mars were thousands of kilometers away, and had neither the resources nor the inclination to help, was Steuby’s guess.

He shrugged. “Probably we’re going to die.”

“Okay,” she said. “But let’s say we didn’t want to die. What would we do then?”

Compared to the Moon, everything on Mars was easy. It had water, it had lots of usable minerals that were easy to get to, synthesizing fuels was no problem, solar power was efficient because the thin atmosphere compensated for the distance to the sun . . . as colonizing projects went, it was a piece of cake. In theory.

In reality, Mars was very good at killing people. Steuby looked at the horizon. The sun was coming up. If he and Bridget couldn’t figure something out real soon, Mars would probably add two more people to its tally. Steuby wasn’t ready to be a statistic. Marco, well, Marco already was.

Now the question wasn’t what the Lift had left, but whether they were going to be able to lift themselves or be left behind for good.

“We’ll see,” Steuby said.

Bridget looked up. “See what?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re talking to Marco.”

“No, I’m not,” Steuby lied.

“Here’s a question, since you’re thinking about him anyway. What should we do with him?”

“What do you mean, what should we do? It’s not like we can strap him to the roof.”

She let it go. They started walking toward the main cluster of buildings and domes that made up the Hellas Basin settlement.

Phobos was rising, big and bright. Sometimes sunlight hit Phobos a certain way and the big impact crater on its planet-facing side caught the shadows just right, and for an hour or so there was a giant number 9 in the Martian sky. Steuby wasn’t superstitious, but when he saw that, he understood how people got that way.

Number Nine Moon was his favorite thing about Mars. He hoped, if he was going to die in the next few days—and due to recent developments, that seemed more than likely—he would die looking at it.

From behind him Bridget said, “Steuby. Stop looking at the moon.”

Marco was the one who had pointed out Number Nine Moon to him, when they’d been on Mars before. “I knew him for a long time, Bridget,” Steuby said. “Just give me a minute.”

“We don’t really have any extra minutes.”

This was true. Steuby climbed up out of the sinkhole. “Come on, then,” he said.

“Where?”

“We can’t walk back to PM,” Steuby said. “Can’t drive. So we’re going to have to fly.”

“Fly what?”

Steuby didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking until he had a little more than moonshine to go on. “Let’s head to the garage over there. I’ll show you.”

They sealed the garage doors after they went inside. It was warm. Condensation appeared on their faceplates. “Hey,” Steuby said. “There’s still air in here.”

He popped his faceplate and smelled dirt and plants. A passive oxygen system in the garage circulated air from a nearby greenhouse. The plants hadn’t had time to freeze and die yet.

With the dirty faceplate off, he could see better in the dim interior. He found a light switch and flicked it on, just in case. “Hey, lights too.”

Now for the real test. Along one wall of the garage were a series of spigots and vents, spaced out over underground tanks. Steuby walked along them, saying silent prayers to the gods of chemistry that one of the spigots would be tagged with a particular series of letters.

He stopped at the fourth and pointed out the letters. “MMH,” Bridget read. “Monomethylhydrazine, right?”

“Yup,” Steuby said. “Also known as jackpot. They must have made it down here for impulse thrusters. Landers would need to tank up on it before they took off again. You know what this means?”

“That we have a whole lot of a fuel that doesn’t work in our ship, which is crashed anyway.”

“No, it means we have half of a hypergolic fuel combination designed to work in engines just exactly like the one built into that rocket out there.” Steuby pointed toward the garage’s bank of south-facing windows. Bridget followed the direction of his finger.

“You’re kidding,” she said. “That thing is a toy.”

“Au contraire, Mademoiselle,” Steuby said. “I’ve seen those fly.”

When he’d gotten out of the construction business after Walter Navarro’s death and spent his next years fleecing tourists, Steuby had briefly worked on an amusement park project. A woman named Veronica Liu wanted to create an homage to classic visions of the Moon from the days before the Space Age. Lots of pointy rockets and gleaming domes. She’d built it over the course of a year, with rides specifically designed for the Moon’s gravity, and then at the opening ceremony she had put on a big show of landing a fleet of rockets specifically designed to recall the covers of pulp magazines from the 1940s. They were pointy, finned, gleaming—and when the amusement park went under five years after Liu built it, they were sold off to other concerns. One of them was still on the Moon as far as Steuby knew, because she hadn’t been able to sell it for a price that made the deal worth doing.

Another was now standing on a small pad a kilometer from the garage. Steuby had spotted it on their first flyover. He didn’t know how it had gotten there, and he didn’t care. All he cared about was finding out whether it would fly.

“That’s a ridiculous idea. This whole thing was a ridiculous idea. You had to come up with a stupid scheme to get rich and now Marco’s dead because you couldn’t just get off Mars like everyone else.” Bridget was working herself up into a full-on rage. Steuby thought he should do something about it but he didn’t know what. His way of dealing with trauma was to pretend he wasn’t dealing with it. Hers was apparently to blow off some steam a short time after the traumatic event. “You wanted to come see HB and loot the mysteries! You said we’d be out and back in no time flat, no problem! Now we’re going to die because of what you said!”

This was the wrong time to remind her that the whole thing had been Marco’s plan, Steuby thought. He wasn’t good at dealing with people, or emotions, but since Bridget was the one with the expertise in battery systems and flight control, he needed her help. Maybe a useful task would help her cope and also keep them alive.

“Let’s find out if it’s ridiculous,” he said. “Come with me and we’ll do a preflight check.” He dropped his faceplate and went to the door.

After a pause, she said, “Why not. If we’re going to die anyway.”

Bridget didn’t really believe him, but given no other option she went along while Steuby climbed up the ladder and poked around in the rocket. From the hiss when he opened the access door he could tell it had been sealed against the Martian dust—as much as anything could be sealed against Martian dust.

She looked at clusters of cables and wires, followed connections, popped open recessed coves in the floor, and eventually said, “We’re still going to die, but electronically all of this looks intact.”

“Perfect,” Steuby said.

“For certain values of perfect,” Bridget said. They climbed back down and Steuby checked the thruster assembly, feeling a surge of optimism as he opened panel after panel and found that the rocket had been staged and left. Nobody had stripped it for parts. Probably they’d looked at it and—like Bridget—thought it was just a toy.

But Steuby knew better. All this rocket needed was juice in its batteries to run the control systems, and fuel in its tanks to fire the engine.

“You watch,” he said. “We’re going to get out of here yet.”

Bridget regarded the rocket with open scorn. “If by out of here you mean out of our bodies into the afterlife, I completely agree.”

“I will be willing to accept your apology when we reach orbit,” Steuby said. “Come on. We need charged batteries and a few tons of dinitrogen tetroxide.” He headed for the garage, and she went with him.

They had ammonia, all they wanted, held in another of the underground tanks. It was useful enough that the base had kept a supply. Steuby was willing to bet that one of the machines in the garage either was designed to oxidate ammonia or could be configured to do so. NTO was a standard liquid fuel for all kinds of rocket models. All they had to do was find the right machine.

“We used to do this on the Moon,” Steuby said. “You mix the ammonia with regular old air, and as nitrogen oxides form you add nitric acid to catalyze more nitrogen oxides. After that, you cool the mixture down and compress it, and the oxides combine to make NTO. It’s just shuffling atoms around. Doesn’t even need heat. All you need is compression at the right time and a way to siphon off the NTO. I would bet Marco’s last dollar there’s an NTO synthesizer somewhere around here.”

They went looking for it and found it within ten minutes. There was even a generator, and the generator even still had power left in its fuel cells. For the first time since Marco’s death, Steuby started to recover his natural state of irrational optimism.

They ran a hose from the ammonia tank over to the synthesizer, fed it a fair bit, and fired it up. Then they wheeled over a smaller tank of nitric acid and pumped some of it in, Steuby doing the figures in his head. They didn’t have to be exact. The reaction, once it got going, just needed continual adjustment of ammonia, air, and nitric acid at the right pressures, and the holding tank on the other end of the synthesizer would fill up with nasty, corrosive, carcinogenic, and in this case life-saving NTO.

The synthesizer rattled to life. Steuby waited for it to explode or fall apart, but it didn’t. It appeared to work. He watched the capacity readout on the tank. It stayed at 00 for a very long time . . . and then it ticked over to 01. Bridget looked on, and the readout ticked to 02 . . . 03. ... “Keep this up and I’ll start to believe you know what you’re doing.”

“Love it,” Steuby said. “This is my favorite machine. Now all we need to do is make sure we can fuel up and take off before the storm gets bad and keep the rocket going straight up and escape the gravity well and make the rendezvous and convince the freighter to slow down and take us on board.”

“When you put it like that,” Bridget said.

Steuby nodded. “Now let’s charge the batteries.”

The sun was all the way up by the time they found the solar array’s charging transfer board and ran cables all the way out to the rocket. Possibly it would have been quicker to pull the batteries and bring them to the charging station, but Steuby was nervous about disturbing anything on the rocket. There were charging ports built into the battery housing, and there was enough power cable lying around to reach Jupiter, so that was the most straightforward way. Still, it took a few hours, and both Bridget and Steuby stood around nervously watching the battery-charging readouts as the morning sky passed through its spooky blue dawn into its normal brownish-yellow.

“Good thing about solar arrays is they’re pretty low maintenance,” he said, to pass the time.

The charging indicators on the batteries lit up.

“Wonder how the NTO synthesizer is doing,” Bridget said. She looked up at the sky. They knew what time it was, but that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the position of Phobos, zipping around three times a day. They were practically in Apollo 13 territory. The plan was this: watch until Phobos was in more or less the right place, then touch off the rocket’s engines, and if they’d avoided fatal errors they would launch, achieve orbit, and then run out of fuel about when the freighter came along. The freighter’s schedule was always the same: wait until the moons passed by, dock with the elevator, split before the moons passed by again. Once the freighter had decoupled from the elevator terminus, it would fire an escape burn. It took two hours or so to prep that burn. Bridget knew this because she had worked the Belt before deciding she liked to experience gravity once in a while. Even Martian gravity.

In this case the freighter wouldn’t be doing a drop. Instead it would be taking on people and supplies, but the time frame was more or less the same. Counting two hours in Phobos’ orbit from when it passed the elevator terminus put the little Number Nine Moon right on the western horizon. They had about an hour from then to fire their rocket, so they could be at escape velocity when they got close to the freighter, which would probably make an emergency burn to save them, but maybe not. Everything would be much more certain if they could match the freighter’s velocity as closely as possible, which meant putting the rocket in a trans-Earth trajectory.

Problem was, if they did that and the freighter didn’t pick them up, they would die long before they got to Earth. The rocket, if it had any fuel left, would do an automated Earth-orbit injection burn and the Orbital Enforcement Patrol would board it to find their desiccated bodies. Steuby hoped he wouldn’t die doing something embarrassing.

Actually, he hoped he wouldn’t die at all. You had to remind yourself of that once in a while when you were in the middle of doing something that would probably kill you. You got so used to the idea that you were going to die, you started trying to make the best of it. It was a useful corrective to articulate the possibility that you might survive.

The day on Mars was forty minutes longer than the day on Earth. Phobos went around about every eight hours, rising in the west because it orbited so much faster than Mars rotated. They needed to get the rocket up to a little more than five kilometers per second for escape velocity. Steuby liked the way those numbers went together. Forty, eight, five. Factors. Of course they had nothing to do with each other, but given the chaos of recent events, Steuby was willing to take his symmetry where he could find it.

Waiting for the tank to fill again, he looked around at the abandoned settlement. HB seemed nice, more like a real place to live than just a colony outpost. There was even public art, a waist-high Mount Rushmore of Martian visionaries carved from reddish stone. Wells, Bradbury, Robinson, Zhao. Marco probably would have wanted to take it if he was still alive, and if they could have justified the weight.

“No can do,” he said out loud. “We’re fighting the math. Man, Marco, when I was a kid, you could get anything. Strawberries in January. We were on our way. Now we’re on our way back. Pulling back into our shell.”

“Stop talking to him,” Bridget said. “He’s dead.”

“Look.” He was crying and hoped it didn’t show in his voice. His helmet was so dusty she wouldn’t be able to see.

Then she wiped the dust away with her gloved hand and said, “Steuby. I get it. He was an old friend and you’re sad. Stop being an ass about it and stop trying to pretend you’re not doing it, because if you divide your attention you’re going to make a mistake and it will kill us. Okay?”

“Right,” he said. “Okay.”

He kept an eye on the NTO tank while Bridget did something to the monitors on the solar array, but he kept thinking: I’m millions of miles from Earth waiting for a robot left over from a failed Mars colony to finish refueling my rocket and hoping a dust storm doesn’t stop us from making a semi-legal rendezvous with a freighter coming back from the asteroid belt. How had he gotten into this situation?

Steuby was sixty-two years old, born in 2010, and had only ever seen one other person die in front of him. That was back on the Moon, where he’d worked for almost fifteen years. A guy named Walter Navarro, looking the wrong way when someone swung a steel beam around at a construction site. The end of the beam smashed the faceplate of Walter’s helmet. The thing Steuby remembered most about it was the way Walter’s screams turned into ice fog pouring out and drifting down onto the regolith. By the time they got him inside he was dead, with frozen blood in his eyes from where the shards of the faceplate had cut him. Steuby had gotten out of the construction business as soon as he’d collected his next paycheck. After that he’d run tourist excursions, and seen some weird shit, but nothing weirder than Walter Navarro’s dying breaths making him sparkle in the vacuum.

They found a tractor that would run and hooked the tank carriage to it. The tractor’s engine whined at the load, but it pulled the tank as long as they kept it in low gear. The rocket’s fueling port was high on its flank, on the opposite side from the gantry that reached up to the passenger capsule in the nose. Ordinarily a crew would refuel it with a cherry-picker truck, but neither Steuby nor Bridget could find that particular vehicle in or near the garage and they didn’t have time to look anywhere else. So they had to tie two ladders together and lean them against the rocket. They flipped a coin to see who would climb, and Bridget lost. Steuby watched her go. “Hey, if you break your leg you’re gonna have a hell of a time getting in the rocket,” he said.

Bridget didn’t miss a beat. “Better shoot me and leave me, then. Like Marco.”

For some reason her tone of voice made Steuby think she was trying to make him feel bad.

“I didn’t shoot Marco,” he said defensively, even though he wasn’t sure what he was defending.

Once the nitrogen tetroxide was topped off, they had to go back and clean the tank out, then fill it with hydrazine. Together the compounds would fuel a rocket via a hypergolic reaction. One of Steuby’s favorite words, hypergolic. Like just being golic wasn’t enough. Neither chemical would do a thing by itself—well, other than poison and corrode anything they touched. Together, boom.

Usually transfers like this were done in clean rooms, by techs in clean suits. Steuby and Bridget were doing it in a dust-filled garage wearing worn-out spacesuits that probably had a dozen microscopic leaks each. He hoped they wouldn’t have to do any maneuvering in hard vacuum anytime soon.

When they cranked the fresh hose onto the nipple and locked it into place, Bridget and Steuby looked at each other. “Just so we’re clear,” Steuby said, “this will blow up and kill us both if there’s any trace of the tetro still in there.”

“Yup,” Bridget said.

“Okay then.” Steuby paused over the dial that would open the synthesizer and start dumping the MMH into the tank. “I’ll try not to talk to Marco anymore,” he said.

“That’s the least of my worries right now.”

“It’s just . . . this is going to sound weird, but I talk to him even though he’s dead because if I talk to him, it’s like he’s not dead, which makes me think I might not die.”

“Turn the knob, Steuby,” she said.

“I don’t want to die.”

She put her gloved hand over his, which was still resting on the dial. “I know. Me neither. But let’s be honest. If we really wanted to be one hundred percent sure of living, we wouldn’t be on Mars.”

This was true. Bridget started to move Steuby’s hand. The dial turned. Monomethylhydrazine started dumping into the tank. It did not explode.

Riding another spike of optimism, Steuby ran to the door. Phobos was visible. They had about eight hours to get the hydrazine topped off and transferred, and then get themselves aboard the rocket. He checked the batteries. They were still pretty low.

“How much of a charge do we need?” Bridget asked.

“I have no idea,” Steuby said. “A few hours at least. It won’t take long to reach orbit, but once we’re out there we’d better be able to get the freighter’s attention and keep pinging them our position until they can get to us.”

“Assuming they want to get to us.”

“They will. The whole point of the Lift is to evacuate people, right? We’re people. We need evacuation.”

Bridget spent some time in the rocket’s crew capsule testing the electronics, which were in fine shape and included an emergency beacon on a frequency that was still standard. “Should we just set it off?” Steuby wondered. Bridget was against it on the grounds that nobody could get all the way across the planet to them and still make the last ship out, whereas if they sent an SOS from near-Mars space, a rendezvous would be easier. Steuby didn’t want to go along with this, but he had to admit it made sense.

Other than that, most of the work they had to do—filling tanks, keeping the solar array focused, monitoring the mix in the synthesizer—was in the shop, away from the omnipresent Martian dust. Most of it, anyway. Humankind had not yet invented the thing capable of keeping Mars dust completely out of an enclosed space. Even so, they couldn’t do everything inside. Bridget found some kind of problem with one of the battery terminals in the rocket, and they had to go out and pop the cover to see what was wrong. While she worked on it, Steuby watched the horizon.

A huge dust devil sprouted on the plain out past the edge of the settlement. They were common when Mars was near perihelion and its surface warmed up. Steuby and Bridget watched it grow and spiral up into the sky, kilometers high.

If that dust devil was a sign of a big storm developing, they were going to be in trouble. The rocket’s engines themselves wouldn’t be affected, but a bad dust storm would slow the recharging of the batteries by, oh, ninety-nine percent or so. That put the full charge of the rocket’s batteries, and therefore their departure, on the other side of their teeny-tiny launch window.

They could get into the rocket either way and hope it was charged up enough for its guidance systems not to give out before they achieved orbit, but that was one risk Steuby really didn’t want to pile on top of all the others they were already taking.

Steuby knew he was getting tired after a dozen runs back and forth to the rocket, and the hours spent working on machines without eating or sleeping. His ears rang and he was losing patience with Marco, who was saying maybe the rocket’s placement was for the best because this way they wouldn’t have to worry about the rocket’s exhaust pulverizing anything important when they lifted off.

Steuby just looked at him.

Oh, right, Marco said.

“Steuby!” Bridget shouted, and Steuby snapped out of his daydream. “That’s freaking me out. I’m alive. You want to talk to someone, talk to me. You want to go crazy and have conversations with dead people, do that after we’re on the rocket. Okay?”

He didn’t answer. She walked up to him and rapped her glove on his faceplate. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

She took a step back. Over their local mic he heard her sigh. “Let’s get these batteries covered up.”

It only took them a minute, but the dust devil was coming fast, and before they’d started the tractor again, it swallowed them up. Winds of this velocity would have flung them around like palm fronds on Earth, but in Mars’ thinner atmosphere it felt like a mild breeze. The sensory disconnect was profound. You saw a powerful storm, but felt a gentle push. Your mind had trouble processing it, had to constantly think about it the way you had to plan for Newton’s Second Law whenever you did anything in zero-G. In space, instincts didn’t work, and on Mars, they could be pretty confusing, too.

Steuby froze and waited for it to go away. It was only two or three hundred meters across, and passed quickly. But as the day went on, there would be more. Steuby looked at the sky, to the west. Phobos had risen. It was all Steuby could do not to mention it to Marco. He’s dead, he told himself. Let him be dead.

“Another hour going to be good enough for those batteries?” he asked. They got on the tractor and headed back toward the shop.

“Do we have more than another hour?”

“Not much.”

“Then there’s your answer.” Bridget paused. She swiped dust away from her faceplate. “Look, Steuby. We’re ready, right? There’s nothing else we need to do?”

He parked the tractor. “Soon as the last tank of NTO is onboard, that’s it. That’s all we can do.”

Bridget was quiet the whole time Steuby backed the tank into the airlock, closed the outer door, uncoupled the tank and pushed it into the shop, and closed the inner door. Then she said, “While you’re filling the tank, I need to borrow the tractor for a minute.”

“Borrow it? Why, do we need milk?”

“No, we need Marco.”

He dropped the hose coupling with a clang. “Are you nuts?” “We have to bring him, Steuby. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Math,” Steuby said.

“Fix the math. Throw out what we don’t need. You said it yourself. If we don’t catch the freighter we’re going to die. What’s the point of having a month’s worth of food for a three-month trip? Or a three-hour trip? That might be all we need.”

“How the hell do we know what we’re going to need?” Steuby shouted. “Have you done this before? I haven’t!”

“I thought you hated quitters,” she said.

“I—” Steuby stopped. She had him. He looked up at the sky. Phobos was low on the horizon, maybe ten degrees up. Less than an hour until they needed to fire the engines. He remembered Marco talking about going back to Earth, and he knew Bridget was thinking the same thing.

“All right,” Steuby said. “Look. We’ll do it this way. You go get him. I’ll babysit the synthesizer. But if you’re not back by the time Number Nine is overhead, I’m going without you.”

“You will not.”

“Try me.”

She left without saying anything else. Steuby didn’t know if he was serious or not. Yes he did. He was serious. If she was going to make a dead body more important than two living people, those were priorities that Henry Caleb Steuben was proud not to share.

On the other hand, he couldn’t really climb up into the rocket and leave her to die. That wouldn’t be right.

On the other other hand, who the hell did she think she was, endangering their rendezvous with the freighter?

On the . . . what was this, the fourth hand? . . . it would be pretty ironic if Steuby took off without her and then missed the rendezvous anyway, so both of them got to die cursing the other one out.

There was also the entirely plausible scenario of them taking off on time and still missing the freighter, so they could die together.

While the synthesizer poured NTO into the tank, Steuby suggested to himself that he adopt a more positive outlook. Maybe we’ll make the freighter, he thought. It’s only six klicks to where Marco is. An hour out there and back, tops. Unless—

He called Bridget up on the line-of-sight frequency. She was just visible. “What?”

“So, um, you have something to cut that piece of the railing, right?” he asked.

“No, Steuby. I survived twenty years working in space by forgetting tools.” She broke the connection. Fine, he thought. Be pissed if you want.

Another dust storm rolled in maybe ninety seconds later. Figures, Steuby thought. Right when I have to go outside again.

One human-equivalent amount of mass had to come out of the rocket. Steuby stuck his head in the crew compartment. Dust blew in around him and he clambered in so he could shut the hatch. What could he get rid of? He started to panic. What if he threw something away and they needed it?

“Marco, help me out,” he said. Bridget wasn’t around. She couldn’t give him a hard time. He wished he’d been able to crunch all the launch calculations and see whether they had an extra eighty kilos of payload slack. Maybe he was worrying over nothing.

He wriggled through a tight hatch into the storage space below the cockpit. There were lockers full of crap back here. Five extra helmets and suits. He pushed three of them up into the cockpit. He found spare electronics and computer components. They piled up in the pilot’s seat. There were two water tanks. He took a deep breath and vented one of them even though he’d just filled it an hour ago. That saved almost a human’s worth of mass right there. Now that he’d started, though, Steuby couldn’t stop. What if one more thing thrown out the hatch was the difference between making that five point oh three kilometers per second and making a bright streak in the sky as they burned up on reentry?

He stuck his head into the cockpit and saw that the dust storm had blown through again. The suits, spare gear, and a bunch of other stuff went out the hatch, banging against the gantry before falling to litter the launch pad.

In the west, Phobos was high, nearly forty-five degrees. Steuby pulled empty metal boxes out of the storage compartment and threw them out the hatch. Then he had to head for the shop and make sure the last fuel tank was topped off with NTO, or nothing he’d done in here would matter.

When Bridget got back, Steuby was standing in the open airlock. She backed the tractor in and he hooked up the tank. Marco lay face-up in the small equipment bed behind the tractor’s seats. The whole front of his suit was soaked in blood and caked in dust. Steuby climbed onto the tractor and Bridget drove them out to the rocket. “You connect the hose and I’ll carry him up,” Steuby said.

“This is Mars,” Bridget said. “He only weighs about sixty pounds. I’ll take him. You know more about the fuel system than I do.”

“Whatever,” Steuby said. He still had that teetering sensation that panic was right there waiting for him. He started the last fuel transfer and watched Bridget climb the gantry with Marco slung over her back. She pushed him in ahead of her and then climbed in. “Shut the hatch!” Steuby shouted. She couldn’t hear him. A few seconds later she came back out, shut the hatch, and climbed down.

They stared at the hose where it was connected to the NTO tank. “Think it’s enough?” Bridget asked.

The tank’s feeder valve clicked shut. “That’s all she’ll take,” Steuby said. “It’ll have to be enough.”

He disengaged the hose and backed the tractor away. “So how do we move the gantry?” Bridget asked.

“We don’t,” Steuby said. “The exhaust will do it for us.”

“Not ideal,” she commented.

“Neither was holding everything up to go collect a body.” Steuby looked around. “Anything else we need? Time is short.”

She was already at the base of the gantry ladder again. “Then let’s move.”

Steuby waited for her to get all the way in, then slid feet-first through the hatch. He turned and tried to push the gantry back, but it didn’t move. “Forget about it, Steuby,” Bridget said.

“I don’t want it to tip against the rocket and tear a hole in us while we’re lifting off,” he said.

She jammed herself into the hatch next to him and together they shoved at the gantry. It still didn’t move. “You think the exhaust will push it far enough away before it starts to tip?” she panted.

“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be trying to push it myself,” he said.

“I mean is it likely? Can we take the chance?”

“It’s the only chance we’ve got,” he said. He backed into the cockpit and Bridget closed the hatch.

They buckled themselves into the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, lying on their backs and looking at the sky. Old-fashioned, Steuby thought. Like we’re off to fight Ming the Merciless or something. By accident he ended up in the pilot’s chair. “You want to be the pilot?” he asked.

“There is nothing in the world I care about less,” Bridget said. She powered up the onboard flight-control systems and saw that their battery life read about four hours of full operation. Steuby saw it, too.

“Sure hope that freighter answers fast,” he said. “Where’s Marco?”

Bridget adjusted herself in her seat. “Down in the back. Get us out of here, Captain Steuby.”

“Blastoff,” Steuby said. He flipped the failsafes on the fuel-mixing system, took a deep breath, and pressed the rectangular button labeled IGNITION.

Liftoff was like nothing Steuby had ever felt. He’d never actually been in an old-fashioned rocket before. Every time he’d gone from Earth to space he’d used the space elevators out of Quito or Kismaayo. This was multiple Gs, what the old astronauts had called eyeballs-in, sitting on top of a bomb and riding it into orbit. Steuby was terrified. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see very well, he didn’t know if they were going in a straight line or curving off into a fatal parabola . . . he wanted to start screaming but he was afraid if he did he wouldn’t be able to get a breath again. As it was he could only gasp in little sips of air that felt like they weren’t making it all the way down into his lungs. Bridget wasn’t making any noise either, which on the one hand comforted Steuby because it meant she wasn’t giving him a hard time but on the other hand upset him because she was solid and reliable and he wanted to hear her say something reassuring.

At first the sound was loud, overwhelming, but as the atmosphere thinned out it modulated down into a rumble they felt more than heard. The rocket didn’t shake itself apart. It didn’t shred from a hole caused by the gantry. It went straight up like it had been made to do, and if Steuby had been able to speak he thought he might have cheered. They’d done it. If they managed to live long enough to rendezvous with the freighter, people would be telling this story for decades. Also they might end up in jail, but at the moment that was fine with Steuby. Jails had air and food and water.

The thruster cut out. Their velocity was five point seven kilometers per second, plenty for escape velocity. They were nine hundred and sixty-one kilometers from Phobos, which arced away from them toward the horizon. They rose through its orbital plane. The rocket started to tip sideways, aligning its long axis with the direction of Mars’ rotation. They were curving up and out of its gravity well, and now they could see the vast reddish emptiness of the southern highlands. Storms tore across the eastern limb, where it had been daylight the longest. Olympus Mons peeked over the horizon far to the northwest, its summit high above the weather.

“We did it,” Bridget said.

“We sure did. There’s a little fuel left,” Steuby said. “Trans-Earth burn, or do we park here and wait for help?”

Bridget leaned over and activated the rocket’s emergency beacon. “Park it here,” she said. “We don’t really have anywhere to go.”

Steuby slowed them a little, right down to the edge of escape velocity. He didn’t want to get into a parking orbit in case the freighter wanted them to do a rendezvous burn. He looked toward the Tharsis plateau, now visible as their silver museum piece of a rocket rose higher and arced west, following Number Nine Moon. They would be coming up on the freighter if they were lucky. They’d already had a lot of luck, and just needed a little more.

“Hope somebody comes back,” Bridget said. “It would be a shame to let all this go to waste.”

“Somebody will,” Steuby said.

But it wasn’t going to be him. No, sir. He was done with everything that didn’t obey the gravity of Planet Earth. I might go back to the Moon, Steuby thought.

“You were right,” he said to Bridget.

“About what?”

“Bringing Marco. I gave you a hard time about it.”

She shrugged in her harness. “Doesn’t matter.”

The ship’s comm crackled. “This is Captain Lucinda Nieto of the freighter Mary Godwin. We are responding to a distress call. Over.”

Steuby toggled his mic. “This is . . . well, I don’t know what the ship is called. But we sure are glad to hear from you.”

“We have a fix on your location. If you are able, stabilize your altitude and stand by for rendezvous. How many on board?”

“Two,” Steuby said.

“Three,” Bridget said at the same time.

He looked at her. Then he leaned into the mic. “Sorry, three,” he said.

“And what the hell are you doing out there, exactly?” Captain Nieto asked.

“Not quitting, Captain,” Steuby said. “We sure appreciate you giving us a lift.”