Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Igor rose to fame as the main pioneer of ion-propulsion technology. By the time Eliot was in secondary school his name slipped off anyone’s tongue when asked to name a famous engineer, and, although Igor was serving prolonged missions to Mars, his sights were already set on interstellar travel. The UK Space Agency recruited him to work on their Off-World Colonization Programme. Igor had been approaching retirement age by then, but the rumour was that the UKSA had offered the old man something he could not refuse.

Thanks to Igor’s invention, it took Eliot and his crew only forty-nine days to pass through Mars’ orbit, and he watched the planet grow wide in the window.

Eliot had taught himself the mechanics of ion propulsion. The engine on the Damocles used radio waves to tear the electrons off atoms of argon to give them a positive charge. Heating the gas up to 50,000°C, turned it into a substance known as plasma, the fourth state of matter. It gave Eliot a small thrill to know that plasma – the substance created inside nuclear fusion reactors, the stuff that suns were made of – was also being produced by the engine on their ship. A magnetic field directed the plasma out of the back of the rocket like an aerosol from a pressurized can.

Igor’s rocket provided them with enough thrust to accelerate constantly at less than a thousandth of a g. This had always seemed a small amount to Eliot, but it nevertheless meant that their speed was increasing all the time. It had taken them seven weeks to fly by Mars but, at the rate they were travelling, they were scheduled to reach Saturn in just over a year, even though it was much further away.

Terra-Two was three lightyears away, a figure that made interplanetary distances seem relatively measly. Eliot knew that, at their current acceleration, it would take the crew 150 years to reach Terra-Two, but Igor and his team had engineered the ship’s engine to swing by Saturn like a ribbon around a maypole, using the planet’s gravity to increase their speed by a factor of 100, enough to catapult the Damocles from their solar system and into interstellar space.

As the red planet loomed large in the window, Eliot began to wonder what it had been like for Commander Sheppard, Cai and Igor, who had served multiple missions on Mars. Eliot didn’t find it difficult to imagine Igor weathering a dust storm, his pellucid blue eyes shining behind his visor as he endured another season of sunless polar nights.

‘Do you think we’ll be able to see the hab-labs from here?’ Astrid asked when she entered the kitchen and joined Eliot by the window. The air was bitter with the smell of coffee – Juno was behind them, scooping the black sludge of brewed grounds into the disposal unit.

‘Do you think we can see the what?’ Poppy asked, dusting crumbs off her overalls.

‘Not from here,’ Juno said. ‘With a telescope maybe.’ Mars was the size of a copper penny.

‘Do you ever wonder what it’s like down there?’ Eliot asked. Juno shook her head.

‘Like a desert,’ said Poppy. ‘That’s what Commander Sheppard says.’

‘Like a cold desert,’ said Juno. ‘Just you wait until we get to Jupiter. We’ll actually get close to it.’

Eliot could not help but smile as he imagined watching the gas giant from the window of the crew module. A late but exciting addition to their mission involved helping to deliver supplies to the US station orbiting above one of Jupiter’s moons. Eliot was looking forward to meeting up with the seasoned astronauts on station, but he was still curious about the surface of Mars. If he squinted he thought he could see it, pock-marked and terracotta. The dusting of ice at the poles – larger on the top than the bottom – suggested that it was winter, now, in the southern hemisphere.

‘Hey.’ Astrid turned to Eliot, rousing him from his reverie. ‘Igor says he has something to show you. On the engineering deck.’

Eliot’s ears pricked up with curiosity. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘What?’

Astrid beamed. ‘Terra-Two,’ she said, and then rushed out of the room. Eliot hurried after her and down the ladder that led to the engineering deck.

In Eliot’s capacity as trainee engineer, he spent a lot of time with Igor on the windowless engineering deck, and it had quickly become one of his favourite places on the Damocles. When he walked, he could feel the ship’s heartbeat through the soles of his feet. What little light there was on the engineering deck came from the scrolling readouts off the monitors and the orange glow of hot filaments.