FREE STORIES 2012(32)
He thought of how nice it would be, to sleep in a soft bed, to take an attractive serving girl to the same bed. . . . Yes, life would be pleasant until that final sleep in that same soft bed.
The Duke of Jagai stood and wearily reached for his helmet and shield, an old man, gray hair glinting in the sun, and tired beyond belief.
The sword flashed in a short, bright arc, and the rope parted and twisted its way downward.
The years and fatigue seemed to melt from his body as he buckled his helmet and dressed his shield on his arm. He stood straight and tall and strong, and his eyes were hell-bright!
With a strong and steady stride, Asgalt, Duke of Jagai, marched down to meet the Shang.
Taking the High Road
by R.P.L. Johnson
Personal Log: Lori Childs - Senior Planetary Scientist
Date: 12/04/2037 (+4 Months 7 days)
Distance From Earth: 1.19AU
They waited two weeks to tell us about the accident.
I guess they had to be sure. There was no point in making us worry unnecessarily. But it meant that when the announcement came, it seemed there was no way out: no wiggle room, no chance of a second opinion.
I was in the Deck 3 Lab when the call came through to meet in the storm shelter. Beth Young was behind me, almost back-to-back in the small compartment. She was checking the readouts for the solar array: something to do with a power drain in the aeroponics lamps. Anyway, she was looking right at the data. If there was some kind of solar storm, some unpredicted event that could force us into the storm shelter she would have seen it in the data. She just looked at me and shrugged.
I was never a very good astronaut. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mars: I have done ever since I can remember. I used to dream about walking on that red dirt, and my whole career has been about making that dream a reality.
But getting to the red planet takes a different set of skills. I never triggered any red flags that would have seen me bounced me from the mission, but neither was I comfortable in space.
We were two decks down from the storm shelter. Not far, not in a ship like the Liberty, but far enough when you’re expecting radiation or pressure alarms to start sounding any second.
Some people say they can feel the difference in gravity between decks, but I think they’re just fooling themselves. The Liberty looked like two grain silos connected by a tether five hundred metres long that was essentially one huge carbon molecule. One silo was the crew compartment, the other housed the reactor. And the whole thing was spinning through space to give us the illusion of gravity as we hurtled between Earth and Mars. At the centre of rotation was a small unmanned module that housed the communication gear and solar array mounted on gimbals so that they always pointed where they were supposed to despite our rotation. On that scale, the three metre difference between decks means next to nothing.
Commander Campbell looked like hell, as if he hadn’t slept for two nights although I had seen him at breakfast and he’d been fine then. He didn’t say much, he just played the message that had come through at the start of the morning shift.
I don’t remember much of it, just snippets like how the file was marked MC+ meaning it was for the Mission Commander’s eyes only. I remember wondering if Campbell was going to get into trouble for showing it to us. That was before I realised that rebukes from Mission Control were the last of our worries.
There had been an accident on Mars: an ‘Unexpected Environmental Event’ in the Agency’s typically understated parlance. Even two weeks later they were still working out exactly what had happened, but the best guess was that higher than expected winds had forced enough dust inside a joint on the fuel farm to clog a pressure valve. Shortly after that initial fault an explosion had devastated the site. All telemetry from the fuel farm ceased and reports from other systems all pointed to a massive systemic failure. Now, two weeks later, the only data they were still getting were temperature readings and they were showing Mars ambient.
The fuel farm was dead, and with it had gone all the other modules intended to support us during our time on Mars.
I don’t think I realised at first what that meant. I remember turning to Beth and seeing tears in her eyes. The Liberty had finally spun down to Martian gravity three weeks ago, and great globes of one-third-gravity teardrops clung to Beth’s lashes until she blinked them away.
The fuel farm was our ticket home. It was a self-contained chemical plant that mixed hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to produce methane. It had been sent to Mars on an unmanned probe along with the habitation modules twenty-six months ago during the last launch window. Making fuel on site spared us from hauling that mass all the way from Earth. The fuel farm was what had made a manned mission to Mars a reality and now it was gone.