Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Juno?’ He listened to his voice echo in the darkness, then stood with great difficulty. His feet were like blocks, his toes felt as if they had swollen in his boots and pain spiked up the back of his leg. He limped to the hatch and slid down the ladder.

On the middle deck, the alarm thundered in his ears. He looked up and down the half-lit corridor, calling out the names of his crew.

He knew that Astrid, Eliot and Commander Bovarin were probably coming to the end of their spacewalk by this time of the afternoon, and so he headed to the control room, expecting to find everyone chatting triumphantly, giving each other high-fives and crying joyful tears because they had repaired the ship. But when he arrived, he found that the control room was empty.

Jesse finally discovered Poppy, Fae and Juno gathered in the kitchen like mourners at a wake. Poppy was bent over the table, her hands clasped together, sobbing uncontrollably. Fae was putting cans of food in boxes. ‘We’re going home,’ Juno said. She appeared like the sun from the corner of the room, and Jesse smiled in spite of himself at the sight of her.

‘You need to pack,’ Fae told him. ‘You don’t have long. Please get your personal effects together in a box,’ she handed him one, a metal container twice the size of a shoebox, ‘and then come back here for further instructions. I would prefer if you packed within half an hour.’

‘Wait, what?’ Jesse asked. ‘Why?’

‘The service module can’t be fixed,’ Juno told him. ‘Didn’t you hear it over the headset?’

‘I was up in the greenhouse,’ Jesse told her.

‘They’re making us leave,’ Poppy said, her voice thick with despair. ‘They’re making us leave them.’

Jesse looked at Fae in disbelief. The doctor’s hands were shaking a little and she lowered her eyes. His gut twisted with grief at Poppy’s words. ‘Is this true?’ he asked Fae, desperate to believe that it wasn’t. If they left now, she and Cai, Commander Sheppard and Commander Bovarin, would only have a few more hours to live.

Before Jesse could speak, Commander Bovarin entered and they all looked up, straightening their backs. Astrid stood in his shadow, her hair still tied up under a skullcap, which made her flint-black eyes curve up like a cat’s. ‘The shuttle will depart in T-minus six hours,’ Igor said, looking at his watch, then at Fae. ‘You’ve already begun the preparations?’

Jesse simply stared wordlessly at the man, his mind reeling. He could hardly begin to accept what Igor was saying, what it meant.

‘No.’ Astrid stepped in front of the commander, but he waved her words away.

‘The decision has been made,’ he said.

‘And that’s it: you’re just giving up?’ Astrid’s voice was loud in the hush of the kitchen and her shadow stretched across the table.

‘The decision has been made,’ he repeated stiffly.

‘Aren’t you going to at least tell them?’

‘Astrid.’ Fae’s voice was full of reproach. It was rare for any one of them to deliberately disobey a senior’s orders.

‘Tell us what?’ Poppy asked.

‘That there’s a chance to save the mission.’

‘Astrid, would you please—’

‘What is she talking about?’ Poppy asked.

‘Eliot worked it out.’ Astrid grabbed a marker from the middle of the desk, flipped over a discarded document and began writing. ‘Look here. We need to survive about two months for a rescue from Phobos.’ Poppy leant over to watch her write. ‘That means we need oxygen.’ She wrote ‘O₂’ next to a bullet point. ‘And enough power to get and keep the comms online. We already have more than enough food to last us, and water if we ration it, and use the rest made from the fuel cells—’

‘But the service module’s not working,’ Poppy said, as if anyone could forget.

‘Yes, the main one, the one that is supposed to last us the two decades of this journey. But the escape shuttle can support a crew for six months. If we rewired the shuttle and used it as an auxiliary life support system, it could keep us alive – all of us – for at least twelve weeks. That’s more than enough time for us to be rescued. Enough time for a team from Phobos to come with spare parts and a new module.’

‘But—’ Poppy rubbed her head in confusion. ‘It took us months to get from Mars to Europa.’

‘But Mars is closer to Jupiter in its orbit now than it was in July,’ Astrid explained. ‘And the Russian shuttle is lighter than us. It could take them only two months, even hauling a service module.’

‘If they launched this week,’ Juno said, staring down at the page.

‘And that still doesn’t solve the problem with the computers,’ Cai said. ‘The thermal control system has shut down; we’re radiating all our excess heat out into space.’

Astrid smiled as if Cai had asked the exact right question. ‘So our engine and all the electrical systems we keep running mean that we are making excess heat from electrical energy all the time, and the job of the thermal controls are to get rid of the heat, to cool us and all the equipment down—’