What was really annoying is that he was probably as good as he said he was. Like both of his parents, Luther was a geologist. He graduated from high school at fifteen and had been taking intense college courses in hydrogeology for the last year. His whole family was part of the water team, which was one of the most important—or maybe the most important—science team on the mission. Without water we wouldn’t have shielding for radiation, oxygen, water for cooking or drinking or bathing, or pretty much anything. The liquid water the rovers and satellites discovered would probably be too salty for us to use. It could be filtered, but there also didn’t seem to be a lot of it—at least as far as we knew. But ice was different, and there was supposed to be a lot of it in the polar caps and in the ground. The Mbedes had to find water ice in large quantities, harvest it, process it, refine it, and store it. They’d work with the chemistry team to break it down to its atomic components—hydrogen and oxygen. And they also had to work with the survey team to locate and evaluate caves so that we could use them for greater protection from the radiation, dust storms, and temperature shifts. A lot was riding on them, but to hear Luther talk, it was all going to be just fine. That’s how he always put it. “Just fine.” He was confident he was going to be the boy who saved Mars One. Or something like that. He probably already had sketches of the statues future generations should build in his honor.
So, no, we did not rush at each other for a back-slapping hug. I’m not saying we stood there like a couple of Old West gunslingers, but that’s how it felt.
“When’d you get in?” I asked.
“Yesterday.”
“How is it? They make you jump right into training?”
Luther grinned. “No. I went out last night with some local girls. Had some fun at a dance club.”
He didn’t say “wish you were there,” ’cause we both knew that he was glad I wasn’t. Let’s face it, Luther knew he was all that. He walked into any room and the girls were all over him.
Why should that matter to me? I loved Izzy, right?
Yeah, well, I think we could both agree that situation was pretty complicated. I loved Izzy and I was positive I was going to love Izzy for a long, long time. But we were going to be on Mars forever. Soooo . . . there was that.
I think Luther was somehow able to follow my thoughts because he gave me the biggest, widest grin I’d ever seen.
“Everyone else here?” I asked.
“Zoé is here but Nirti’s got a family thing and she won’t be here for a few days.” He clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly as he looked around. “This is going to be fun.”
“Sure.”
“Of course it is. Every historian in the world is sitting there with their fingers over their keyboards ready to write the next chapter of history.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Who are you quoting?”
“The latest mission PR packet. But what does it matter? It’s true. After all the testing and preliminary rounds and all that, we’re here, dude. We’re in the last phase before we leave. Aren’t you excited? I am. I’m ready to jump out of my skin. We’re going to conquer Mars.”
“Technically,” I said, “Mars can’t be conquered because of the agreement . . .”
Yes, there is an actual agreement. It’s called the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, and the bottom line is that the major nations agreed that everything beyond Earth’s orbit belongs to all of humanity. No one country can stake a claim. Which sounds great if you don’t know anything about human history.
“I’m not talking about an armed invasion, dude,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m talking about claiming our place in history. I’m talking about the fact that we’re about to really become who we were born to be. A thousand years from now everyone will still know our names. There will be statues of us on Earth and on Mars. They’ll name schools after us in our hometowns. They’ll give scholarships in our honor. Think about it. The Luther Mbede Scholarship for Advanced Exogeology. The Zoé De Jaeger Award for Excellence in Astrophysics. The Nirti Sikarwar Special Award for Space Medicine.”
“Hey, what about me?”
“Oh, sure, there will definitely be coupons for the Tristan Hart School of Air-Conditioning and Heating. Or, at very least, the Tristan Hart Scholarship for Lawn Mower Repair. I’m sure they’ll come up with something appropriate for the mentally challenged.”
I took a swing at his head. Not trying hard to connect . . . but if I had, would it have been a bad thing?
Luther ducked back, laughing, and then ran for the building with me in hot pursuit. I guess I was laughing too. It was easy to hate Luther, but it was hard not to like him.
We were still a hundred yards from the main entrance to the mission training center when the door burst open and Ecklund, one of the senior flight officers, stepped out, looked around, spotted us, and began to wave his arm frantically.
“Hart, Mbede! Get in here,” he bellowed. “Now!”
Ecklund didn’t sound angry. He sounded very upset. Freaked.
Luther and I exchanged a quick, worried look and then we were running full tilt for the building.
Chapter 28
* * *
We crashed through the door together, all shoulders and elbows, and then raced side by side to catch up to Ecklund, who was hurrying into the big mission control room.
Luther shot me a brief worried look. “You think it’s the Neo-Luddites? You think they did something?”
“God, I hope not.”
Everybody was crowded inside, all turned toward a tall, pale, sad-faced man who looked like he should be running a funeral parlor. Mission Director Jurgen Colpeys. He was the man in charge of everything from training the colonists to overseeing the delivery of the supply payloads. He was also going to Mars with us, and once we launched he’d turn everything over to Ecklund, who’d be staying on Earth. In almost every way that mattered Colpeys was the guy who took all of the science and made it work. He and my mom worked together on a lot of the most important mechanical aspects of the mission. They didn’t always get along but they were a lot alike. Usually stiff, unsmiling, unemotional, and impossible to read.
Except now.
As Luther and I skidded to a stop near the outer fringes of the crowd, we could both read the expression on Colpeys’s face. Or . . . expressions.
Anger, mostly, and a whole lot of it. Some fear, too. And what looked a lot like indignation.
Behind him was the eighty-foot-wide, fifty-foot-tall high-definition view screen, which showed a huge structure of girders, machines, and habitats wrapped in reflective foil, wires, and struts. It all formed a huge wheel and it hung in geostationary orbit 390 miles from Earth. I recognized it. Everyone who’d paid attention to the space race over the last few years knew it. They called it the Shanghai Wheel, and it was a kind of floating factory the Chinese built in space in order to assemble spacecraft for their long-range plan to colonize the moon. Although China had signed the same Outer Space Treaty as everyone else, it didn’t mean they were working with the rest of the world. Most countries had their own space programs, and there were some multinational groups—official and private. Mars One was a nongovernmental group with volunteers from dozens of countries, and even though we had some Chinese members, they were not there by official sanction. Most of them were Chinese who had citizenship in America, England, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. China officially stood apart and kept its own space program heavily under wraps. They didn’t share technology or information and generally didn’t even communicate much except in times of a major international emergency—and there weren’t a lot of those in the world of space exploration.
We knew some things about what they were doing, though. The Shanghai Wheel had dozens of the ultra-high-tech 3-D printers used to make parts for lunar landers, habitats, and more. We had a launch station, too, though ours had a double hub built around t
he two transit vehicles. We called ours Lucky Eight because it kind of looked like a big figure 8.
The Shanghai Wheel was really more of a cylinder, and even while they were still building it the Chinese astronauts covered the whole structure with a special kind of Mylar called Kapton. The version they used—at least as far as our scientists had been able to guess—had several loose layers directly over the Wheel to reduce heat buildup while at the same time acting like solar panels to provide extra juice for the machines. NASA was working on something like it, and so were a few private companies, but the Chinese were way out in front of anyone on that kind of tech. Aside from heat management, the Kapton sheeting pretty much hid everything. No one really knew what they were building up there. It was the exact opposite of Mars One, because we sold the TV rights to almost everything we were doing. Before the Chinese blacked out their signal, we’d seen that they were building something, but no one could quite figure out what it was because it was too big to be a lunar lander. The running theory was that they were building an asteroid mining craft. There was a separate space race going on among industrial nations and private corporations to strip-mine asteroids for everything from titanium to gold, just floating around out there for the taking. The Outer Space Treaty did not prevent either corporations or countries from taking what they could grab. It was crazy, but you couldn’t plant a flag to claim ownership of a moon, a planet, or even an asteroid, but you could mine them for raw materials.
Now, the Shanghai Wheel was empty, the Kapton shielding torn away and, it seemed to me, burned. A lot of the girders were twisted out of shape and debris floated away from it toward the pull of Earth’s gravity.
“What’s going on?” asked Luther loud enough for half the crowd to turn toward us. “Is it them?”
Everyone knew whom he meant, but I saw heads shaking. No.
Then what?
Colpeys saw us and signaled to a tech. “Run it again.” While the technician began tapping keys, Colpeys looked at the crowd. “For Luther, Tristan, and anyone else just joining us,” he said gravely, “the video footage you’re about to watch is highly confidential. It is part of a longer video, however this part has not been broadcast to the public and isn’t even on the Internet.”
I saw a lot of heads nod.
Colpeys nodded too. “The Chinese have been leading the race to colonize the moon, and we’ve benefitted from some exchanges of technology and information. But they have generally kept out of the world community of space programs. They are the only space-faring nation that declined to join the International Mars Exploration Working Group because they publically stated that they have no interest in going to Mars. The moon has always been their goal. The Shanghai Wheel was the first factory of its kind put into orbit, and to a great degree we’ve emulated their design, though our factory was designed to fabricate parts for our mission and to use it as a launch station for the transit vehicles.”
The video began to play from the beginning as Colpeys spoke.
“At three thirty-one this morning a malfunctioning Chilean communications satellite collided with the Shanghai Wheel. That impact did considerable damage to the structure and, as you can see, tore away much of the Kapton covering. Luckily there was no loss of life and the three technicians aboard the Wheel have been able to return to Earth via a small supply spacecraft. They splashed down in the South Pacific four hours ago.”
“Only three technicians?” asked Tony Chu, Mom’s engineering assistant. “I thought they had twenty or thirty people stationed on the Wheel.”
The director spread his hands. “The Chinese government issued a statement stating that all three of the current staff have been safely returned to Earth. There was no indication that anyone was left behind or, God forbid, killed during the collision.”
Luther spoke up. “Okay, but so what? I mean, it’s great that no one was killed, but why is everyone so freaked? The Lucky Eight’s nowhere near the Wheel. The debris field isn’t going to mess with us.”
Colpeys fixed him with a steady, steely stare. “The debris is inconsequential,” he said slowly. “What matters is that the Wheel is empty.”
“Again,” persisted Luther, “so what? I don’t mean to be rude but—”
“Watch the video, son.”
“Eish,” growled Luther impatiently, then rattled off something else in Afrikaans that I’m pretty sure was obscene. He only said it loud enough for me to hear. I’d been trying to learn some of his language, but this came out rapid-fire and all I caught was a reference to something nasty about goats.
As we watched, the image changed to one with a time stamp that stated it was from November of last year. It was taken from something that moved from left to right across the top end of the Wheel, which was an angle I’d never seen. All of the pictures the Chinese had ever shared were of the Wheel seen from different side-on angles, and from the bottom, which looked like the bottom of a tube of Pringles. The top in this video, though, was open, and we could see inside.
“This footage was obtained for us by sympathetic friends inside the American NASA program and is in fact part of a longer and more classified video from a DARPA satellite.” DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is America’s superscience geek squad who mostly make weapons. It’s part of the Department of Defense.
The video image crossed the opening of the Wheel and as it did so the angle allowed us to see deeper into the thing. What at first looked like a big black empty nothing was anything but. There was a machine inside. It wasn’t a mining ship. It wasn’t a lunar lander either. Or a satellite or anything like that. It was way too big.
I heard Luther gasp. Or maybe it was me. Inside the Shanghai Wheel was a spaceship. A transit vehicle. Almost exactly like ours.
“That footage was taken last November,” said Colpeys into the stunned silence. He clicked the button to show the current image of the ruined Shanghai Wheel. “And this was taken this morning.”
Now the vast emptiness of it meant something. It was devastating.
We turned to each other in silence, each of us unable to speak. No one was naive enough to ask “where’s the ship?” We knew. As far as modern science went there was only one place a ship like that would go.
The Chinese had already sent a ship to Mars.
Chapter 29
* * *
Colpeys told us what they knew. It wasn’t much. You’d think that with the space race so hot and with so many eyes looking up you couldn’t hide the launch of a spaceship. Yeah, you’d be wrong.
You’ve got to remember this, though: Space is big. Really freaking big. Even the distance between here and the moon is enormous. We’re talking 238,000 miles. Now imagine a zone of space around Earth stretching out that far in every direction, and spinning around in that zone are more than twelve hundred active satellites and three thousand outdated dead ones. And half a million bits and pieces of assorted space junk. Could you hide the launch of a transit vehicle that’s not much larger than a subway car in all that?
Sure. And we might have never known about it if that satellite hadn’t collided with the Wheel.
“Mr. Colpeys,” I said, raising my hand to catch his attention, “what’s this all mean? Are the Chinese already there?”
He took a long time answering that. Way too long.
“We don’t know,” he said. “We simply do not know.”
“Do we have any estimates of when they left?” Someone asked a question, and I turned to see Zoé De Jaeger standing ten feet away. Her thick blond hair was twisted into a single braid and pulled around front, and she stood there wrapping the end of it around her fingers with her usual nervous energy.
Colpeys shook his head. “The optimum launch window is November fifteenth, which is our launch date.” He paused to pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s possible that they could have left as early as last June eleventh, in which case they would already be on Mars.”
“No,” I blurted, and everyone
shot me annoyed looks for interrupting. My face went hot, but Colpeys gave me a go-ahead nod. I cleared my throat and plunged in. “If they were already on Mars they’d be yelling about it. I mean, really . . . It’s Mars. It’s not just history, it’s politics. It means they won, that they beat everyone else. Why would they keep it quiet?”
Colpeys shook his head. “We simply do not know.”
Chapter 30
* * *
There was a lot of discussion and a lot of theories, but it was all guesswork. I noticed that Tony Chu was now standing with my mom, their heads together in a private conversation. They didn’t look happy. No one did. And no one knew where the Chinese ship was, whether it was actually going to Mars—though where else would it go?—or how far into the trip they were.
Or if they made it at all.
There’s a running joke that “Space travel is an exact science—except when it’s not.” There are so many things that can go wrong on a trip like this. Mechanical failure, debris, unexpected foreign objects, human error. Take your pick. And it’s not like you can go back to the barn and try again tomorrow. The fact that more people haven’t died out there is incredible. We had lots of smart people nitpicking every detail, lots of backup systems—what we called redundancies—and procedures to make it as safe as possible.
So far only robots, orbiters, and rovers had gone to Mars. No people had. People have different needs than empty spacecraft, so there’s been a lot of focus on providing the things we’ll need for private time and downtime. Sometimes you just need to blob and watch your shows, you know? So, we were all taking as much digital media—books, comics, TV shows, and movies—as we could. We were going to be out there a lot longer than 501 days. Luckily digital media wouldn’t add much actual weight, and more could be uploaded later.