Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Please stop,’ Poppy pleaded and they all fell silent, bristling in the glacial light of Europa. Poppy’s head spun with confusion. She didn’t want to go back to Earth either, and the thought of leaving half of the crew to die on the ship had broken her heart.

‘I’m glad they did it,’ Jesse finally said. ‘I feel like an idiot for not helping. I can’t believe I thought I could leave Igor and Fae and Cai and Commander Sheppard to die here. Could you?’

‘I know what you mean,’ Poppy said quietly. ‘Sitting on that shuttle a week from now knowing that our crewmates were suffocating to death.’ Fae put her head in her hands, and Cai looked as if the thought made him ill.

‘We’re the senior crew,’ Igor said. His voice was raspy, and he stopped a moment to cough into a handkerchief. ‘This—’ He coughed again. ‘T-this is a choice that we made to give you the best chance.’ Poppy noticed little petals of blood blooming on the cotton fabric in his fist.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Jesse said, turning to him. ‘But it wasn’t our choice.’

‘It wasn’t yours to make,’ Igor said, his teeth gritted with fury.

‘They’ve given up enough,’ Eliot said. ‘Igor gave up the rest of his life for this mission. Sheppard left his wife and baby behind. Fae clearly never wanted to be here in the first place.’

‘That’s right,’ Astrid said, her eyes pleading for understanding. She looked at Igor and then Fae and Cai. ‘Please understand, Commander Bovarin. I know we’re supposed to listen to orders. And I almost always do, but this time…’ she took a shaky breath. ‘This time there was too much to lose.’

‘I’ve heard enough of this. I say we punish her,’ Harry said, crossing his arms.

‘How?’ asked Jesse, looking to Igor, then back to Harry, whose fists were still clenched. ‘Throw her overboard like pirates?’

‘On Mars, the punishment for a serious offence, up to and including mutiny, is confinement,’ Juno said.

Jesse snorted in disbelief. ‘You mean lock her up?’

‘That’s exactly what she means,’ Harry said, stabbing a finger at Eliot and Astrid. ‘Both of them.’

‘She’s your sister, and this isn’t a prison,’ Jesse said, then turned to Juno. ‘What happened to doing things differently?’

Juno folded her arms. ‘We have to maintain the rule of law amongst ourselves. Otherwise, anything goes. She might be my sister, but we’re all brothers and sisters here and Astrid betrayed us.’

‘The rule of law.’ Jesse snorted. ‘Oh, this is about your plan to build a utopia by getting us all to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules you invented. Like that’s never happened in human history before.’

‘We have a chance to do it right this time,’ Juno said, although she looked a little wounded. ‘And I thought you believed in the Damocles Document. In making a better world?’

‘I believe in you. But, don’t you even realize what utopia means? It means – here’s a fun fact – it means “no place”. Somewhere that doesn’t exist. There is no place where humans stop being humans. We’re going to fight wherever we go, we’re going to argue. In the future, we’ll fuck our children up, and drill holes into the ground and spill oil in the sea. We’ll make mistakes.’

‘We certainly will with that attitude,’ Juno said. ‘There is no law up here, Jesse. So someone has to make it. We can’t just go around treating each other however we want, hurting each other. One of us has to stop it.’

‘And who made you the judge? Why does it have to be you?’

They were standing in a row now, Astrid and Eliot on the furthest end, Harry and Juno advancing on them, Poppy and Jesse in between. Poppy could see the fire and fear in Juno’s eyes, and she looked around at the senior crew, hoping that they might put an end to the fight, but Fae was leaning over the dashboard on the communications deck in tears, muttering something like ‘enough’ or ‘one thing after another’ in German. Poppy knew that she hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours. Neither had Igor, who was wheezing into his fist. Cai had never inserted himself into an argument before and he didn’t now.

Disappointed, Poppy felt as if she’d leant over the seat of a lurching taxi to find there was no driver at the wheel. Who was in charge? On Terra-Two, the Betas were the people Poppy would have to make decisions with, would have to defer to and trust. Yet, at this moment, it seemed as if they hated each other.

‘Okay!’ Poppy shouted and raised her hands. Everyone turned to look at her. ‘In light of the fact that Commander Sheppard is not here and this decision involves all of us, we should have a vote.’ Fae lifted her head. Igor – who was leaning heavily against a desk for strength – attempted to straighten his back. ‘Please can we?’ she asked them both.

‘Vote over what?’ asked Fae.

‘What to do next,’ Poppy explained. ‘I’m not saying that what Astrid and Eliot did was right, disobeying orders. But maybe it’s right that with large decisions like this, life or death decisions, we should all be involved.’

‘That’s not how a ship works,’ Igor said. ‘Or any mission. There is a chain of command.’