FREE STORIES 2012(33)

There was not so much panic as anger. Less shouting than I thought the situation warranted, but what there was echoed off the aluminium walls. Campbell held up his hands for quiet which was a long time coming. Eventually he said, “As of now, I am activating the emergency response plan. Now I realise it’s been a while since you’ve read it but it’s in your kits and it’s on the network so dig it out and get to know it. There will be a meeting of section heads in five minutes. For everyone else, remember that there is no immediate danger. Our biggest enemy at the moment is panic, so I expect to see everyone at their stations. That is all”

You are going to die, but don’t panic and go back to work. That is all.

The shouting started up again even before he had finished speaking. He let us carry on, like an angler letting out line for the fish to tire itself out before reeling it back in.

“I know this looks bad,” he said eventually. “But we’ve got months of consumables, more if we’re strict about it, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend that time with my thumb up my ass watching the O2 gauge and waiting to die.

“We have a ship full of PhDs. Everyone here is a certified genius and I’m going to ask you to prove it. We’ll find a work around: something they’ve missed. section heads, you now have two minutes.”

Eventually, we did go back to our stations. For one thing, although the storm shelter was big enough to hold the entire crew, it didn’t do so in much comfort and I found that comfort was what I needed right now more than anything. I needed my seat in the lab, my music: the consolations of the familiar.

We were all in shock I suppose. There was a note blinking on my terminal when I got back to my workstation: something about grief counsellors being on stand-by back on Earth in case we wanted to pour out our hearts in an e-mail. But the twenty minute round trip for messages didn’t seem appropriate. In the end we were alone.

“There must be something they can do,” Beth said. “A new orbit, slingshot around Mars and build up speed for a fast trip back—that sort of thing.”

“I don’t think so. If there was, they would have told us.”

Fumi Mashimo and Claire O’Brian had followed us back from the storm shelter and we sat together, knee-to-knee in the cramped compartment.

Beth tried again. “Perhaps they could send a rescue mission,” she said. “It wouldn’t have to be manned, just a heavy lift rocket with a care package of consumables. That might be enough to last until a window opens up for a return orbit.”

Fumi shook his head, long locks of snow white hair swaying in the reduced gravity like a slow-mo video from a shampoo commercial.

“It would take too long,” he said. My youthful years watching old kung-fu movies imbued his accented words with a wisdom they probably didn’t merit. Fumi was a palaeobiologist, not flight crew. He knew as much about Hohmann transfer orbits and Oberth manoeuvres as I did, i.e. not much.

“If it wasn’t manned they could send it at higher acceleration,” Claire O’Brian said. “That must open up some new orbits.”

“Unless it is on the launch pad now, it won’t get here in time. And if it was, they would have told us.” Fumi shook his head again. “There will be no rescue from Earth.”

“Then it’s up to us,” Claire said sounding almost chipper. "Like Campbell said, we have a ship full of geniuses. We just have to figure out a way to harness that."

"Unfortunately," Fumi said, "-gravity is not swayed by academic credentials. There are realities that we must face."

"Realities, yes, but not certainties. Beth, how long would it be until we could harvest crops from aeroponics?"

Beth looked shocked. "We're not set up for that. The aeroponics labs are basically just keeping the seedlings alive until we reach Mars. We don't have the capacity to start farming on board ship."

"What if we made capacity? We're carrying spare parts and lamps ready to be set up on Mars. What if we doubled or tripled the capacity of the labs? What then? We could supplement the food stores and the extra plants would take the load off the CO2 scrubbers."

"That won't get us home," I said.

"No but it enlarges the window for a rescue mission."

"Water," Beth said. "The recyclers aren't perfect, and the more water we use to grow plants, the less we have for ourselves. I'd have to do the numbers, but if we doubled our crop my guess is that we'd all die of thirst before we saw a harvest."

Claire was undaunted. "Then we'll just have to increase the efficiency of the recyclers. Come on, we have to try!" She looked around the small group. Beth was quiet, probably doing the calculations in her head. Fumi was typically inscrutable, but he was the type to dress for dinner and go down with the ship rather than fight for survival. And me? I just wanted to go home.