“One point,” Alta said at last, and Celine found her hopes rising. “This is not exactly discussion, but it is something that you need to be aware of. Neither of the single-stage orbiters docked at ISS-2 is class three or better. Each one can carry only three people, four at a real pinch.”
The others, without a word, turned and looked at Wilmer Oldfield. He frowned back at them. He out-massed the others by at least fifty percent.
Zoe gave a barking laugh. “Starvation rations for Wilmer, until we’re down on Earth. However we arrange the groupings, we’ll have to split up and ride home in two parties. Anything else? If not, we’ll get this show on the road. Jenny. Trajectory and rendezvous?”
“Computed and stored.” Jenny was like a computer herself, steady and meticulous and unemotional. “I allowed an arbitrary start time up to four hours from now.”
“That’s ample. Alta. Confirmed configuration?”
“I recommend we fly just Section Three over to ISS-2. That gives us more fuel for final maneuvering — but not enough to reach ISS-1 if we don’t like what we find.”
“Understood. Any final questions before we go ahead? Yes, Reza, what is it?”
“My specimens.” He was in his most agitated phase. “The Mars life-forms. I realize we have a strict mass limit—”
“Forget it. No Mars samples. Just our bodies, and our personal effects.”
“I refuse to accept that. These are small, they are light, and they are so valuable—”
Zoe cut him off. “I asked for questions, not arguments. They are valuable samples, and indeed we put great effort into collecting them. We will take them with us to ISS-2. If we can create a safe environment for ’ them there, we will leave them until someone can come up from Earth and retrieve them.”
“Suppose we can’t create a safe environment for them?”
“That will be unfortunate. But, Reza, I assume that if it comes to saving you or saving the samples, it is no contest.”
Reza paused for a long time. Celine thought he was about to get into a shouting match with Zoe. Jenny put a hand on his arm. He looked at her, and then again at Zoe. He cupped his chin and cheek in his hand in a classic pose. At last he said, “I’m thinking.”
Zoe glared at him.
She doesn’t get the reference, Celine thought. And Reza is way out of line. He ought to know that it’s the wrong time for clowning.
“No samples,” Zoe said. “If we take nothing back to Earth except our own selves, that is enough. There will be other expeditions to Mars, but we are the first. And we are going home. We are going home. We have come too far and worked too hard for me to accept anything else.”
Reza scowled, and for another moment Celine thought there would be an open mutiny. Finally he nodded, and so did everyone else. Celine felt that it was she alone, Celine (Cassandra) Tanaka, who deep inside whispered, Perhaps.
Jenny Kopal had programmed a careful approach to ISS-2, one that allowed ample time for close-up inspection. Every sensor on the Schiaparelli — as well as every human eye — was trained on the big station as it slowly turned against a background of stars.
Celine, Ludwig, and Zoe were already in their suits, floating at the open entrance to the Schiaparelli’s main hatch. There was no way to dock the Mars ship at ISS-2 without active cooperation from within the station. The first transition had to be an open-space maneuver.
That held no fears for Celine. She loved EVAs. An antenna repair on the outward trip to Mars, when the Schiaparelli floated eighty million kilometers distant from the home planet, had given Celine and Ludwig Holter the record for both the longest and most distant free space activity. That evening, in her excitement and exuberance, she had seduced Wilmer. He had said afterward, as though describing something as far removed from human control as a stellar flare, “I wondered when that would happen.”
Today would be different, and depressing. Straight ahead lay the station, a dark irregular bulk that answered no queries and offered no signs of life. On the left, filling the sky, was an alien Earth. All the normal circulation patterns of the atmosphere had vanished, replaced by great streaks and whorls of cloud that curved across the equator. The surface beneath was rarely visible on the sunlit hemisphere that faced them; but the Schiaparelli’s onboard sensors had recorded south-to-north wind vectors of up to six hundred fifty kilometers an hour. That exceeded by a wide margin the highest speeds ever reported in Earth tornadoes.
“We have attained zero relative velocity.” Jenny Kopal’s calm voice sounded over Celine’s suit radio. “Distance from ISS-2 is eighty meters.”
“Hold there pending further instructions.” That was Zoe Nash. “All right, no point in waiting. Let’s go.”
She led the way out of the hatch. Celine and Ludwig followed more slowly, drifting across toward the space station. By the time they joined Zoe she was waiting at a point between the two orbiters where a station entry hatch was located. She moved the airlock door a few inches with her suited hand, making it clear from her action that the hatch was not sealed. If the inner lock was open, too, the interior of a large part of ISS-2 would be airless.
Celine, moving abruptly from sunlight to shadow, felt a cold like death inside her. It could only be psychological, because her suit maintained internal temperature control. During the return journey from Mars they had talked often about the return to Earth space, and -the joyful reunion they would have with the staff of the big stations when they docked there.
“The orbiter access external airlock is open.” Zoe spoke for the benefit of those aboard the Schiaparelli. She had the hatch fully open and was moving inside. “The inner door of the lock is not sealed. No mechanical locks are engaged. ISS-2 appears to have been relying on electronic control. That was probably the case everywhere on the station.”
The crew of the station are all dead. Celine added those words only to herself. Everyone on the Schiaparelli was capable of drawing the same conclusion without assistance.
Once they were through the inner airlock door, she and Zoe moved away in different directions. Zoe had assigned their duties in advance. Ludwig would remain outside and determine the condition of the two single-stage orbiters. Celine would head for the control room and decide what elements of ISS-2, if any, might be restored to useful function.
Zoe had reserved the most unpleasant job for herself. She would inspect the station’s living quarters.
But unpleasantness was all relative. Celine, easing her way along the corridor that led to the deep interior and heart of ISS-2, had to push her way past four bodies. They rested against the corridor wall, contorted as they had been at the moment of their deaths. She made a brief inspection, enough to confirm that they had all died in the decompression that followed the failure of the ISS-2’s locks.
It had not been a quick death. This corridor was a hundred feet from the lock, and the air pressure drop to a fatal level had been far from instantaneous. There had been time to reach a bulkhead with its own safety airlock, and learn that it too would not work.
Two of the people were holding hands. Celine shone her suit light on their uniform tags and noted their names: Ursula Klein and Lawrence Morphy. United forever in death. They must have made that final gesture deliberately, and if she lived she would find a way to record the fact. Had they also, the living man and woman who now formed freeze-dried and desiccated corpses, had time enough to realize that the cause of all their problems was a failure of the microchips throughout the whole of ISS-2?