Of course, I'd let my own tongue slip in recent weeks, but my or Cedric's foul words never seemed to offend any of the crew, at least that I knew of, but I used the opportunity as a distraction.
"Cedric! Decorum!" I barked because I was finding it difficult to not allow my face to telegraph my uncertainty or doubt. I needed cover. Commander Sabratova seemed to sense it.
"Commander Emerson, please join me aft for a moment," Alyonka suggested, dismissing the password-protected message on the display.
"No!" Cedric argued. "With all due respect, don't exclude us from the discussion. We are all in jeopardy, and six minds are stronger than one or two!"
I thrust up my right hand, my palm facing him with only my forefinger extended. "Mind your bearing, Specialist Hamilton," I commanded.
I followed Aly through the hatch to the ship's cramped storage bay.
"Take a deep breath, Sean," she calmly said once the hatch was closed.
"Good god, Aly! How do you expect me to figure this out? We are in the midd—"
"I do not expect it. I am still lead in this phase of mission,
da
? It is why we learn and practice crew resource management philosophy. We must rely on skills and insights of every member of this crew.
That
is how. You and I are commanding. We must demonstrate confidence. I am as concerned with new information as you, but we must keep emotions in our pants."
I don't know if it was her intent, but her choice of words almost made me chuckle. I symbolically plucked my chest and head with my fingers, then put my hand in a trouser pocket.
"There. Done. Now, what do we do first?" I asked.
"We discuss as a team," she said, opening the hatch.
"Well?" Specialist Hamilton urged, seeing us emerge.
Aly subtly nodded at me to begin.
"You all read only the last part of the message. There was more. The analysts at Central have discovered the refueling systems at all three nodes have been destroyed. There's a much larger debris field at Node One which they suspect is the remnants of Return Four."
Alyonka asked Irenka, "Are the fuel systems connected in any way an accident or malfunction at one could damage other two?"
"A cascade failure?" Simi added.
Aly nodded.
"Not possible," Irenka began. "This is why they are independent. It would be more efficient to have one larger system that distributes fuel to all points, but too much risk of a single point of failure. Also, such a large system would be difficult to deploy and make distribution lines to other points."
"Pleiades Alpha status?" Shizuka asked.
Alyonka answered, "Unknown, but the ship is not present and there is no debris."
"The base?" Shizuka continued.
"The report says it appears to be intact," Aly said, paging back a few paragraphs.
Everyone was silent for several moments, considering the information.
Yes, the prior news was somewhat startling, but failed to compare with the implication of the next. Aly dropped the first bomb. "The solar arrays have been positioned to a geometry consistent for current Martian season."
"That means—" Cedric said with his eyes widened.
"There is or recently was someone down there. Yeah. They must be repositioned locally. It is possible, I suppose, that a remotely controlled automaton could have moved them, or they were moved manually but pointed into the future solar plane, but there is no way to know. We have enough fuel to land, but not enough to return to Earth, and, as already said, the fueling systems on the surface were destroyed," I summarized.
The console near which we floated beeped again.
Imagery to follow
, read the simple three-word message.
The data link had slowed to barely a fifth of the bandwidth it would normally carry due to increasing solar electromagnetic interference. It'd automatically switch to using the Venusian relay soon.
Ten seconds elapsed until the image was fully received. Aly opened the file.
"Well,
hello
there," Simi said.
"Whose are—" Cedric and Irenka then overlapped with "—
those
?"
I'm pretty sure all six of us were staring at the screen with wide eyes, seeing enormous parachutes soiled with red dust.
Simi reached out and drew a tool across one of the chutes. "This one is approximately sixty meters in diameter, and there are three of them," he commented. "The payload must be
very
heavy."
Aly tapped a few icons on the screen to bring up some metadata. "This is six kilometers south of Node Two."
Beep.
"Oh, hell. How many of them are there?" Cedric asked as another set of chutes appeared in the next photograph.
"Eleven kilometers east of Node Two."
Shizuka lassoed a small portion of the image.
"Did someone have a long walk?" I hypothesized, noting what caught Ayani-san's attention. There was a capsule tucked under the edge of one chute, and its outward-swinging hatch had trapped the parachute's material above it. It was obvious to me that it was a manned craft. Not one unmanned deployment to Mars in public history encapsulated or deployed payload inside a capsule of the sort we examined.
"Alyonka, would you magnify the hatch?" I suggested, hoping to see any of the interior configuration.
Her fingers danced on the display.
"
Fuck me
!" Cedric gasped. "That's a
body
!"
None of us could disagree with his observation. There was most definitely a booted foot and lower leg extending from the hatch which was visible in the image.
"Commander Sabratova, can you please make a request to Central Mission?" Cedric requested. "Ask them to send non-oblique ten thousand square meter images of this coordinate …"
He stopped talking as he examined the metadata, "with …" he tapped some more "… twenty percent edge overlap along a vector to central base?"
"No need to ask them," Shizuka spoke. "Now we know range areas where points of interest are, we can scan imagery from Hyper-D database without their help and associated delays."
"That wasn't part of the training we were given. You can do that?"
"
Hai
. I study more than they tell us to read," Specialist Ayani wryly replied.
Beep.
Yet another image was dispatched which displayed a third triple-parachuted capsule.
"How many could those capsules carry?" I asked.
"I'm thinking three," Cedric answered.
"That does not bode well. If you're correct, it means it's possible nine individuals have landed on the surface, and onl—"
"Only six could have departed," Aly said, completing my thought.
Shizuka beckoned us to the opposite side of the ring toward the Hyper-D console. She tapped on a high-altitude perspective image of the area Cedric had spoken of earlier, overlaid a digital geo-referenced coordinate grid, then entered a query on the command line. A few moments later, the first of the images appeared.
Cedric quickly paged through them until something caught his eye, then he slowed until we saw what made all twelve of our collective eyebrows arch.
"Another body," Irenka was the first to say, seeing what was an unmistakably dead astronaut approximately two thirds of the distance between the capsule and the base.
"This is proof the capsule held three individuals," Shizuka concluded.
"We've only seen two," Simi said.
"Yes. But who removed and took the suit's helmet?"
I studied the image closely. I assumed the engineers who designed the suits would have been fools to not ensure the helmet's seal couldn't be disengaged in unbalanced atmospheric pressure, which meant that suit had to have been vented for its helmet to be removed. The helmet was nowhere to be seen, implying someone else had taken it some distance away from the individual who was face down in the dirt, and most certainly deceased.
"Keep going," I suggested.
He flipped through a number of additional images. Nothing else seemed out of sorts compared to what we already knew.
The opposite console beeped once again.
Primary comm will be via Venus relay with effect sol 7 to sol 23. CM ceasing image transfer as it has been noted you have accessed same locally.
Fuel is primary urgency and we are assessing options with all available personnel.
ORDERS:
Intercept S1/S2 in orbit. EVA authorized to transfer excess fuel to O1.
Verify fuel sufficiency after completion of EVA and advise viability to land then return to low Mars orbit at later time.
"They've gone insane," I whispered to Aly as both of us continued reading the order.
Land at point between nodes one/two. Program follows.
On landing, restore base data link if able. Determine origin of other spacecraft if able. Message ends.
Aly began typing a response on the onscreen keyboard:
We note probable human remains in second craft image and also between craft and base. We believe nine individuals possible. If so, one more individual from second craft, location not known.
"It's going to be a while before anyone responds," I said, starting a timer on my chronometer to mark the earliest possible response of about one Earth hour.
"What was all of that about?" Simi asked when we returned to where they were still scouring images.
"We have been ordered to …
randevu
?" Aly spoke, looking at me.
I nodded.
Aly continued, "We are to
randevu
with supply one and two to offload as much fuel from them for Orion One to assure landing and return to low orbit is possible."
"And, if we can't? Or there's not enough?" Irenka asked.
"We will cross bridges we come to."
Cedric morbidly and nervously chuckled. "Or eight people on Earth will be turning keys."
"Let's work through it one step at a time and try not to get ahead of ourselves," I said.
"Without Martian surface radar, we will have to locate S1 and S2 somehow," Shizuka added.
Aly silently nodded.
"I'll pull up the orbital predictions. It's as good a place to start as any," I said and began the task.
What I examined was nothing more than a mathematical model of where the two resupply ships were expected to be relative to our orbit. It was fairly raw without any assistance from surface radar to triangulate and affirm perfect fixes, but it was all we had. I figured if we could get within two thousand kilometers of either one, shipboard radar would find it, allow the two craft to link up digitally, and adjust as needed to intercept.
