Mom was busy typing something but Tony turned to me before I could ask and said, “It’s the water purification systems aboard the Muninn. They failed completely and spewed a lot of raw sewage into one of the tanks of drinking water.”
“Oh no!”
“Yeah, well, it’s even worse than that, Tris,” said Tony. “One of the pipes on the wastewater purification unit burst into the hab and all of that sludge went tumbling around in micro-g. It’s a freaking mess over there. The rupture must have started in the middle of the night.”
“But . . . how?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“How can we not know?”
“Don’t ask me, kid.”
“No, I mean, how’d it get this bad?” I asked. “What about the alarms? What about the automatic shutdowns?”
“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” snarled my mom without looking at us. She hammered at some keys and suddenly the face of Inga Holstrom, chief engineer on the Muninn, filled the screen. She looked like one of the Valkyries from Norse legend. A gigantic blonde with large hands and a face that always looked like she just sucked a lemon. Pretty good mechanic, though. Mom taught her.
This thing really made no sense. Wastewater and solid waste were piped under pressure from the heads to a reclaiming station. The solid matter was then supposed to be stored in compressed blocks for use as fertilizer on Mars. Poop is full of bacteria . . . Mars, not so much. The urine was cleaned and the purified liquid was returned to the drinking water. Sounds disgusting, and it was. But it was also practical. The waste traveled through long pipes inside the walls. There were shutoff systems all through the process, and also alarms for when even the slightest moisture got into the electronics. Even our backups had backups, and yet aboard the Muninn the whole system had faulted out.
So when it comes right down to it, this could not have happened. The fact that it did happen had terrified us all.
Tony and I flanked Mom as we studied the data being sent across from the Muninn. Inga gave us more information in reply to about a million questions Mom fired at her. I was tense, Tiny looked sick, Inga was scared, and Mom was furious.
We were there for hours helping Inga work the problem. Tony and I threw out any suggestion that came to mind. Mom was open to any idea, any plan, or a possible work-around. Anything. Or maybe that’s a space engineer thing. There’s no better environment for teamwork than when there is absolutely no chance of anyone else coming to help. Not when we were millions of miles away from home. Not when answers to urgent questions had a long time delay. So we all pitched in and we worked the problem. Colpeys and some of the other scientists aboard offered advice, but none of them were engineers on our level.
At one point, while I was in the head, I heard Mom having another quiet argument with Colpeys. I didn’t hear much but I heard Colpeys say, “Jean, I gave you all those extra days so you could make sure we didn’t have problems like this.”
And Mom hissed at him and said, “I checked every one of those systems myself, Jurgen. Every one. This couldn’t happen.”
“So why is everyone on the Muninn floating around in their own sewage?”
My mother’s answer was a low growl.
When Colpeys was gone I came out of the head. Mom cut me a look, realizing that I must have heard the conversation. I didn’t say anything and neither did she, but afterward she was even more intense. Which I wouldn’t have bet was possible. Mom attacked the problem with everything she knew and all of her imagination.
Even so, it took Inga four days to fix the system.
Four very long, very uncomfortable days.
She had to take it apart completely, and that meant closing off most of the Muninn’s hab. The rest of the colonists had to capture all the floating drops and lumps of stuff that came out of the broken pipe.
A bunch of people got sick. It became clear that the leak had started small and polluted the drinking water long before the system went critical. Within seventy-two hours half the crew was down with bacterial infections. They burned through half of their stores of antibiotics trying to get ahead of it.
I heard Mom in one of the com-pods talking to Inga. Not actually yelling at her, but close. Mom sounded scared and I think I heard Inga crying. “I understand that you’re sick, Inga, but you have to keep at it. What choice do you have? And when you’re done with that, I want to hear that you’ve upped the purification output by forty percent. No, don’t tell me you don’t know how to do it. Don’t you dare tell me that. My son could fix that system, for God’s sake. You’re a professional. Get up and get it done!”
It was harsh but that was Mom. The tougher things got the less she seemed to really care. It was her defense mechanism, but it worked with most people. Would it work with Inga, especially if she was that sick? It was one of those moments when I kind of hated Mom for how she was acting, but at the same time I didn’t know what else she could have done.
I fled before Mom came out. Later, when she was calmer, I found her at her desk typing in repair notes on her laptop. She had a real-time chat going with Inga and was walking her through the repair. Inga looked gray and sick and ashamed. I felt so bad for her.
Mom saw me, pointed to the other work space, and said, “Log on and do a workup. I want to know how you’d handle this.”
“Handle what? Which part?”
“Focus on the purification system. Go through it and try to figure out how it could fail. I want a list of possibilities. Nothing’s too extreme. Give me anything that comes to mind.”
I nodded and set to work, half listening to Mom and Inga until the job I was doing became so hard I had to really concentrate. The whole day burned off.
The next day was like that one. And the next.
Finally, after a week of absolute hell, the Muninn’s wastewater system was up and running, and the purification was chugging along with a 52 percent bump. Mom compared what Inga did with what I’d come up with. My redesign maxed out at 43 percent. She gave me a long, sour look.
“Do better,” she told me. Then she blanked out all of my work and told me to start over.
Moms. Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot them out of an airlock.
Chapter 74
* * *
The incident on the Muninn put everybody aboard our ship on edge for a couple of weeks. Inga had used parts from the backup water purifier to upgrade the main one. If it failed again they’d be screwed. Purifying the polluted water was going to take time because it had to be triple filtered, tested, and filtered again. And like I said, they were now more than halfway through their store of antibiotics.
You see, bacterial infections weren’t supposed to be a big thing. Mars probably doesn’t have bacteria, and even if it does it wasn’t likely to get into our food and water. Everything there would be filtered, and the heavy-duty filtering equipment was already there, sent on the unmanned ships. There were more antibiotics and other medical supplies waiting for us, of course, but they were on the planet. Each ship had enough water for two additional months beyond the journey. Now the Muninn was coasting on the edge and they might have to go down to half rations by the time we made it to Mars.
One day over lunch Nirti asked Zoé, “Why can’t we just send some of our water and supplies over to them?”
Zoé stared at her as if she’d asked why we couldn’t go outside the ship and sunbathe. “You’re joking, right?”
“No. The Muninn’s right there!”
“It’s not ‘right there’; it’s two hundred kilometers off the starboard bow.” When Nirti looked blank, Zoé took a mustard packet and set it in the air in front of her. Then she placed a ketchup packet to the right side and about a yard away. “The ships are not under power,” she explained. “Remember, we’re like rocks thrown—”
“At Mars,” finished Nirti. “I know. But we have engines. And we have retro jets and all that. Couldn’t they slow down and let us catch up and then we can send someone
over in an EMU with supplies?”
“You don’t understand the physics,” said Zoé.
“Maybe not as well as you, but I know it’s possible.”
Zoé said, “Sure, it’s possible, but it’s incredibly risky. If we slow the Muninn there’s a risk of interfering with its planned trajectory. A thousandth of a degree off here could make them miss Mars completely. Or they’d have to burn fuel to correct. And to get the ships within EVA distance is very dangerous. There’s only a few hundred meters of cable, and whoever’s doing the space walk would be taking a terrible risk. No . . . it’s too dangerous.”
Nirti folded her arms and stared at Zoé. “So what you’re saying is that we’re not smart enough to figure it out, even if it would mean saving the lives of twenty people? Wow. So much for supergeniuses.”
And before Zoé could stop sputtering long enough to come up with a reply, Nirti pushed off and floated away.
Chapter 75
* * *
I got a video message from Izzy. It was different from the others she’d been sending recently, and it was the first one in almost a week. I watched it in one of the com-pods, making sure all of the soundproof door seals were in place.
The first thing I saw was her empty bedroom, but I could hear her offscreen, and the camera jiggled so it was clear she was adjusting the angle of her laptop. The only lights were the desk lamp and the glow of the screen. Then Izzy came around and sat down. She wore a pink bathrobe. Something new, probably a Christmas present. No makeup, and her dark hair was damp from the shower. Somehow she looked older. Different. She smiled at the screen, but it wasn’t the kind of smile she usually gave. It wasn’t the bright everything’s-right-in-the-world smile she’d worn during all those recent marathon messages, and it wasn’t the smile from before I left. The smile that made the world stop spinning.
It wasn’t sad, either.
Just . . . different.
“Tristan,” she began, “I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long.” She paused, shook her head. “It’s weird that I call this ‘writing to Tristan’ when it’s just me sitting in front of the camera. Does that make me some kind of old-fashioned girl? Maybe. I don’t know. It feels like writing because it’s not really live. But then, I guess we’re not live either. Not really.”
She stopped talking and looked down at her hands, which seemed to be wrestling with each other on top of her desk. The digital counter on the lower left of the screen ticked through nearly fifteen seconds before she spoke again. Her eyes came up and she looked directly at me. I knew there was a time lag and there was distance, but I swear that in that moment we were actually seeing each other.
“Tristan,” she said in a soft whisper of a voice, “you know that I will always love you. That won’t ever change. Not on the level where it matters most. But . . .”
And that was as far as she could get. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, broke, and ran down her cheeks. She began shaking her head. Very slowly.
Five seconds later she reached out and turned off the video. All I heard were her last four words.
“I . . . can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
And the screen went dark.
Chapter 76
* * *
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Luther as I pulled myself out of the com-pod. “Have you finally accepted that you’ll be the last person they let off the ship when we get there?”
I went past him without saying a word. I didn’t even tell him to go take an EVA without a suit. Not worth the breath.
My bunk seemed a million miles away. Funny how pain distorts everything, even distance. Back on the Lucky Eight I’d shared a room with Luther, but on the ship I had a sleeping pod all to myself. Funny how something that small could feel huge and lonely.
“Tristan,” called a voice and I turned to see Sophie emerging from her bunk. She hadn’t put her hair in a ponytail and it drifted around her face like mist. Or like she was a mermaid floating in the water. I almost ignored her, too, but she pulled herself up and over to intercept me. She looked at my face and there was immediate concern in her eyes. “What’s wrong, cher?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said, but she could see the lie through the cracks in my voice.
“What happened?”
Oh man, I really did not want to talk about this with anyone. Not until I figured out what was going on with that video from Izzy. I wanted to find something to dismantle and rebuild. I wanted to find something broken that I could fix.
Sophie grabbed a handhold to anchor herself and touched my cheek with her other hand. She looked past me, to the com-pods, and nodded. “Is it Iseult?”
“Izzy,” I growled. “Her name’s Izzy.”
Sophie nodded. She took a deep breath and sighed. Then she pulled me to her, wrapping one arm around me while still holding on to the wall.
“Tell me,” she said.
I didn’t want to. I refused. It was too much and too private.
I told her anyway.
Chapter 77
* * *
When I was done going through the whole thing, I felt exhausted, drained, beaten up. Sophie listened without interruption. She held my hand and when I was done she reached out to brush away a tear that clung to the corner of my eye. It floated away and for a long, strange moment we watched it, neither of us speaking.
Finally she said, “Did you only stay together because of the reality show?”
“Yes,” I said, then immediately contradicted that. “No. I . . . I don’t know.”
“You stayed together until the launch even though you knew it would be the end. And you’ve been trying to keep it alive all this time, non? Is that safe? For you own hearts, I mean.”
“Safe? No. It’s not smart, either, and we both know it. It’s not practical. Let’s face it, could there be a more obvious metaphor for why people break up than a teenage boy literally going millions of miles away to live on another world? But we couldn’t let go. I know I couldn’t. Maybe I can’t. Maybe I’m too stupid or immature to do what I know is right.”
“You’re getting there now,” said Sophie. “And I think it’s clear Iseault is there a few steps ahead. It happens like that in matters of the heart. I’ve never heard of it ever happening at the right time for both people. Maybe it has never happened in all of history. But what is very clear is that Iseault has been getting closer to it.”
“How come I didn’t see it?”
“You probably did, Tristan, but you didn’t want to see it. Or admit it to yourself. But you just told me about the videos. Over the last few months her messages have been about nothing, non? About minutia? About trivial things? I believe that was Iseault fighting the truth to which she was coming. But she was afraid. There’s no doubt, cher, that she loves you. Anyone who ever saw you two on your show would know that. Anyone who ever heard you talk about her could see it. But you left. And no amount of love can stretch all this way. It’s unreasonable and unrealistic and unfair to expect it to be otherwise.”
“I know.”
“She is a lovely young woman,” said Sophie. “Smart and very pretty. She’s also rich and famous, too, which means that the whole world is watching her. Imagine how hard that must be. She is the storybook princess who is supposed to pine for her lost prince. She is supposed to hold true, to be true. The world expects her to be every bit as tragic as the Iseult of the poems. And how cruel that is of everyone.”
“I know.”
“It seems that now the princess has realized that and cannot abide it.”
“I know,” I said. We sat on the edge of her bunk, held in place by straps, the canvas cover half zipped. Sophie held my hand.
Sophie said, “Iseult is probably drowning.”
I turned sharply to her. “What?”
“She is. All that attention, non? All of those expectations, and the burden she placed on herself to love you forever? This is too much for anyone to bear, and more than anyone should try to
bear. Trying to hold on to Tristan and Izzy is going to pull her under. She has to let you go or she will drown,” said Sophie.
I said nothing.
“If you love her—and I believe you truly do—then you have to let her go. You are a sweet young man, Tristan. Don’t let your own heartbreak and loneliness turn you cruel.”
I turned to Sophie and wrapped my arms around her and held on to her and tried so hard not to let any of this be true. And all the time I reached desperately for the rope of need and want that tied me to the beautiful girl back on Earth. I did that with one hand, and with the other I fumbled for the knife and began to cut.
Chapter 78
* * *
Can a bad day get worse? Sure.
How bad did it get? The water purification system on the Muninn failed. Again. It was a dangerous malfunction the first time. It was worse this time. Much, much worse.
I’d just gotten to sleep and was dreaming that I was back on Earth, with Izzy—of course—and we were both laughing at some joke Herc just cracked. I think I was laughing in my sleep, but then Mom suddenly woke me up by slapping the outside of my bunk. “Get dressed. Now!”
I didn’t get all the way dressed. She sounded too upset to waste time, so I went sailing through the ship in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Mom was in her shop, with Tony Chu and Colpeys crowded in around her desk. Inga was on the video screen looking really scared.
Mom was yelling at her. “What do you mean, it failed? How could it fail if you fixed it the right way?”
“I don’t know,” said Inga. She was so defensive that her tone was hostile. Couldn’t blame her. It was really hard to be on the receiving end of Mom’s anger.