Rescue Mode - eARC (12 page)

June 2, 2035

Earth Departure Plus 49 Days

14:28 Universal Time

Arrow Biology Laboratory

“That’s what an extremophile looks like up close and personal,” Amanda Lynn was saying, pointing to the shapeless blobs on the display screen.

Virginia Gonzalez peered at the screen. “Like amoebas,” she murmured.

“Sort of.”

Arrow
’s minuscule biology lab was barely large enough for the two of them. Gonzalez, tall and leggy, was wearing gym shorts and an oversized sweatshirt. The shorter, stockier Lynn was in mission-standard sky blue coveralls. They sat side by side on foldable stools that looked flimsy, but were perfectly adequate in the ship’s one-third gravity.

Lynn pointed to the screen, “I picked that one out of a lake in Antarctica that’s been covered with ice for several million years. It’s called a psychrophile.”

“Amazing to think it could survive that long and under such cold conditions. Most of the extremophiles I’ve heard of are near volcanic vents on the ocean floor or someplace really hot.”

“This one thrives in the cold. Little bugger’s filled with natural antifreeze: temperatures below freezing don’t bother it at all.”

Her eyes riveted to the screen, Gonzalez asked, “You expect to find something like that on Mars?”

“Hope so,” Lynn replied. “The amino acids and other biomarkers the Chinese found were in the ice of the permafrost underground.”

Before Gonzalez could ask another question, Lynn pointed to the screen and explained, “This kind of bacterium is a methanogen. It excretes methane as a waste product of its metabolism. The earliest satellites we placed in orbit around Mars detected whiffs of methane, but the latest ones haven’t found any trace of the bug farts—”

“Bug farts?”

Lynn’s normally dour face broke into a bright smile. “Yep. Bug farts.”

She clicked the remote in her hand and the screen went dark.

Gonzalez got to her feet and stretched. “So you’ll be working with Catherine and Hi once we get to Mars.”

Nodding, Amanda said, “They do the digging, I examine what they’ve brought up.”

“Hi will do the digging,” Virginia said, a slight smile on her lips. “He won’t let Catherine get her hands dirty.”

“I don’t care who does the digging as long as they bring me their results.”

“It doesn’t bother you that Hi’s a chauvinist? The way he hovers around Catherine. He thinks she’s a little porcelain doll.”

Amanda shrugged. “Most men are bigger and stronger than most women. I don’t mind letting Hi do the muscle work.”

She flashed back to a memory of growing up in Detroit, how her brothers would walk with her, protect her on their way through the bad neighborhoods they had to get through to reach school.
That’s what men are built for,
Amanda thought.
Some of them are born rapists, some born protectors.

Virginia interrupted her thoughts. “Do you think Catherine and Hi have made it yet?”

Amanda shook her head. “If they have, they’ve been awfully quiet about it.”

Giggling, Virginia said, “Maybe they put gags in their mouths.”

“That’s kinky!”

“What about Mikhail?” Virginia pursued. “I know he’s married, but he looks so lonely.”

“You getting the hots, girl?”

Her smile turning sly, Virginia replied, “Just looking over the field.”

“If I got excited over any of them, it’d be Ted. He’s cute, and I bet he’d be fun.”

“He’s married, too.”

“Yeah. What about Bee?”

“Also married,” Virginia said, with a theatrical sigh.

“Yeah, but I hear his marriage is on the rocks.”

“Maybe. But he’s such an iceberg,” Virginia said.

“You try to melt him down a little?”

“No!” But then Virginia’s expression turned thoughtful and she said softly, “I wonder if you could, though.”

Amanda shook her head. “It wouldn’t work.”

“You mean you wouldn’t try it?”

“Look at me. Short and squat. And black, to boot. Now you, you’re tall and slim and good-looking.”

“And Hispanic.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

Suddenly tired of this subject, Virginia said, “Enough fantasizing. I’m not going after any of these guys. We have a job to do, and screwing around will make everything too complicated.”

Amanda nodded agreement. “You’re right. We’re dedicated scientists, not those female acrobats from the latest porno simulations.”

“Acrobats?”

“If you’d seen some of the positions they take, then you’d know why I call them ‘acrobats’.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“A few,” Amanda said, almost defensively. “But I didn’t bring any of those vids aboard the ship with me.”

“I wonder if Mikhail has. Or Hi?” Virginia mused.

“Ted might,” Amanda said. “But not Bee.”

Virginia laughed. “That’s right. Bee will maintain proper discipline, just like it says in the mission manual. And so will we, dammit.”

“Yeah, sure. And only four hundred and forty-two days to go.”

June 12, 2035

Earth Departure Plus 59 Days

08:00 Universal Time

Clear Lake, Texas

For Vicki Connover it was a routine day of running errands, except that her son Thad was in the car with her. School was out for the summer, and he had surprised his mother by volunteering to accompany her as she zipped from store to store, buying groceries and household supplies.

The hum of the car’s electric motor was barely audible as they drove down Bay Area Boulevard from the Gulf Freeway. She’d taken the car off AutoDrive once she left the freeway and already felt burdened by actually having to steer. There were some roads that hadn’t been approved for AutoDrive due to the many stops and starts required, not to mention the frequent side roads and shopping center entrances that made it difficult for the automated systems to have the reliability the insurance companies demanded. It was amazing to Vicki how quickly she’d become accustomed to having the tiresome chore of navigating traffic be assumed by the car. One of these days she wouldn’t ever have to drive; she’d just get in the car and tell it where to go.

Vicki was impatient for the new technology to become universal, although she was certain that Thad barely noticed the change. The transition to AutoDrive had occurred during his childhood and he’d grown just as accustomed to it as she had to the electric car revolution of her youth.

But Thad was not entirely in favor of it.

“It’s not really a motorcycle, Mom,” he was saying as they dove toward the freeway. “It’s a motor
bike
. A Honda CBR. It’s really neat.”

“It has a gasoline engine and isn’t equipped to drive for you?”

“You don’t ‘drive’ a motorcycle, Mom. You
ride
a motorcycle. And, yes, it has a gasoline engine: single cylinder, four stroke, liquid cooled, fuel injected two hundred forty-nine cubic centimeter engine. It gets about sixty to seventy miles per gallon.”

Thad was smart enough not to mention it could go from to zero to sixty miles per hour in six and a half seconds.

Visions of fatal accidents filling her thoughts, Vicki replied, “It’s awfully dangerous, though.”

“Mom, I’m a good driver! I’m careful!”

“It’s not you, honey. It’s all those other idiots on the road.”

“I can stay off the freeways, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“I don’t know. Let me talk it over with your father.”

“Jeez, he’s a zillion miles away!”

“I’ll ask him about it the next time he calls.”

Thad slumped back in his seat, pouting teenagedly. “You asked me what I wanted for my birthday,” he grumbled. “I want a motor bike.”

“Thad—”

The driver of the truck approaching them on the opposite side of the road was distracted by the submarine sandwich that was sliding out of his hand. Had his truck been able to use AutoDrive, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Vicki, still talking with her son, didn’t see the rear of semi-trailer swerve into her lane until it suddenly loomed right in front of her. She did what any driver would do: she mashed on the brakes and turned hard right in a vain attempt to avoid a head-on collision.

The quiet of the drive was shattered by the shriek of tires on the pavement and the sickening crunch of her car’s Fiberglas frame impacting against the aluminum and steel truck at a closing velocity of seventy miles per hour. The frame of Vicki Connover’s car shattered, as it was designed to do, to absorb as much of the energy of the collision as possible. Airbags deployed to cushion the occupants’ impact against the plastic dashboard and steering wheel.

Unfortunately, the laws of physics have no pity. The more massive truck kept coming forward after the impact, tipping over in less than a second and completely flattening the car beneath it.

Vicki Connover and her son Thad scarcely knew what hit them before they were crushed to death by the errant truck.

The truck driver hardly received a scratch.

June 12, 2035

Earth Departure Plus 59 Days

12:30 Universal Time

Johnson Space Center

“So who the hell’s going to tell him?”

Nathan Brice, normally as impassive as a Zen guru, nearly shouted the question. The
Arrow
’s flight director, Brice had once been saber-slim, but years of desk work had given him a noticeable belly and thinned his light brown hair. A veteran of three missions to the International Space Station and one to the Moon, he sat at his desk in rolled-up shirtsleeves as he glared at Bart Saxby’s image on his office’s wall screen.

Saxby, in his own Washington office, looked equally distraught. “What about other family members?” he asked.

“There’s no other immediate family,” answered Pat Church, sitting in front of Brice’s paper-strewn desk. “Vicki and Thad were all he had.”

Church was Ted Connover’s personal physician; he had known and worked with the Connover family ever since Thad had been an infant. He felt more like an uncle to the boy than simply the family’s doctor. Church had been an aspiring astronaut who had failed to make the cut when he’d applied at the end of his residency at Baylor. Nearly six feet tall with buzz-cut black hair that was just starting to show flecks of gray, Church had often been mistaken for the astronaut he’d aspired to become as he strode through the halls of the Johnson Space Center.

Saxby looked at the two of them from the wall screen. “Well,” he said, “it will have to be one of you two. Your call, Nate.”

Brice grimaced and turned to Church. “You know him better than anybody else, Pat.”

Church nodded grimly. “Yeah. I ought to be the one to tell him. Poor guy.”

Saxby said, “Tell Benson about it first. He’s the commander up there. Let him decide if he wants to do it or if he wants you to do it.”

“Good thinking,” Brice said.

Church repeated, “Poor guy.”

The news hit Bee like a kick in the gut. To him, the
Arrow
’s crew was like family. He remembered the day, just a week or so before they’d left Earth, that Ted had told him his son had passed his driver’s test and was soon to be “unleashed” on the unsuspecting drivers of Texas. Ted loved his wife deeply and was very, very proud of his son.

“So you think you should be the one to tell him?” Bee asked Pat Church’s image on the comm screen. He was sitting in the command center, and glanced nervously over his shoulder, worried that someone might come in.

In his head he counted
one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand
. . .

The time lag in messages to and from Earth was getting longer each day.
Arrow
was hurtling outbound from Earth at more than 25,000 miles per hour; the ship had covered so much distance that communications were plagued by unnatural pauses at the end of each transmission, even though the messages moved with the speed of light. Normally, it was a pain in the butt. Now, with this news, it was torture.

“Absolutely,” came Church’s reply at last. “Although there’s a part of me that would love to chicken out and let somebody else give him the bad news.” He let out a sigh. “But it’s part of my job, I guess. Anyway, who’d be better to assess its potential impact on Ted’s performance?”

“Okay,” Benson agreed. “Let’s do it like this. I’ll tell him that you’re going to call in ten minutes for a private consult. In the meantime, I’ll let everyone else know what’s happened. I want to know how he took it as soon as the two of you are finished talking. And I’ll want to know what we should be doing, saying, watching for, on our end.”

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand . . .

“Sounds good.”

Shaking his head, Bee muttered, “They’ll have been buried for damned near two years by the time he gets to visit their graves. That really sucks.”

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand . . .

“That’s an understatement,” Church finally said. “Okay. I’ll call back in ten minutes.”

Bee clicked off the comm set. Good Lord, he thought. We all knew the risks we were taking. But this . . . this is awful. How’s Ted going to take it?

One look at Pat Church’s face and Ted knew the news from home was bad.

Bee had told him Church wanted to talk with him one-on-one. Now Ted sat alone in the comm shack and felt his whole body turn to ice.

“Both dead?” he heard himself ask.

After the interminable delay, Church nodded solemnly. “It was instantaneous. They didn’t suffer.”

“That’s good.” But in Ted’s mind, he was raging, Didn’t suffer? They’re dead, for Christ’s sake! Dead!

“I’m sorry, Ted.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

One thousand, two thousand . . .

It was as if he were disembodied, floating miles away and watching this poor slob sitting there with his guts ripped out.

“If there’s anything I can do,” Church said, looking miserable.

Bring them back, Ted replied silently. Aloud, he said only, “Thanks, Pat. I appreciate it.”

Church ended the transmission and the comm screen went blank. Ted sat there thinking,
If I’d been with them, if I’d been driving, I could’ve avoided the accident. I could’ve reacted faster than Vicki did.