THAT DAY WAS full of preparation. Thebes was going over the suits and EVA toolkits, testing for weak seals and possible malfunctions. Ivanov was giving Sully and Devi a full medical workup before round two while Harper and Tal rigged the communications dish for transportation. In addition to his duties as an astrogeologist, Ivanov was Aether’s doctor. He hadn’t practiced medicine in decades and his bedside manner wasn’t much to speak of, but he made the blood work quick and painless. The second spacewalk would take at least eight hours, maybe more—about twice as long as yesterday’s outing. After Ivanov had finished Sully’s medical exam she left the lab and went to the command deck, where Harper and Tal were watching the footage of the first walk.
“Fellas,” she said. “Not worried, are you?”
“Hell no,” Harper scoffed. Tal pursed his lips while he shook his head with comic certainty, arms crossed, eyebrows scrunched. The bravado was a joke. Everyone was worried.
“Good, me neither.” Sully floated toward the cupola and looked out. In the distance she could see Mars, still just a pinprick, lost among the stars. At the control board Harper and Tal went back to their reconnaissance, rewinding and replaying the video until they were satisfied, then moving on to the next piece of footage. Sully stayed in the cupola, communing with the darkness just beyond, the savage landscape she was about to inhabit once again—dangerous and beautiful and unknown. She knew she was ready; she’d gotten the physical okay from Ivanov, and the playbook for the walk was firmly imprinted on her brain, but there was an emotion stirring that didn’t belong. Devi’s dream—it must be fear. A thick-rooted fear, growing in the part of her where reason didn’t live. Someone else might have called it intuition, but not Sully. She wrote it off as nerves and turned away from the window, back to the ship, back to the plan.
ELEVEN
AUGIE AND IRIS reached the small camp by the lake as darkness fell, and they stumbled into the first tent they came to, a sparse but welcome respite from the raw cold of the outdoors. Despite the dilapidation, the crisp scent of frozen mildew, and the minimal furnishings, it felt more like a home than anywhere Augie had lived in years. There were four camping beds with canvas mattresses, an oil-burning stove, a gas range, and a few sticks of furniture. The aluminum rods that held the vinyl shell of the tent in place curled overhead. Augie felt he was sitting inside the belly of a whale, admiring its rib cage. In the center of the room was a card table with a few folding chairs, and beyond it a desk covered with meteorological maps and weather records, a small generator, a few wooden crates used as bookshelves. A dozen kerosene lamps with blackened glass chimneys were clustered in the center of the table, and a mismatched collection of ragged carpets lay on the plywood floor. There was a comfort in that one room that the entire Barbeau outpost had lacked—a sense of personality, of coziness. It was clear that lives had been lived here. Meals had been made, novels had been read, games had been played.
They put down their gear and began to look more closely at what had been left behind. The crates were packed with paperback books, mostly romance novels, along with a few mysteries and one or two basic cookbooks. The mattresses on the cots were sheathed in protective plastic, and upon unwrapping the first one, Augustine found a few wool blankets, a crumpled sheet, and a mealy pillow stuffed inside the plastic case. He shook out the sheet and stretched its elastic to cover the corners of the slim mattress. Plumped the pillow. Refolded the blankets.
At the table, he lit a few of the lamps, then propped the front door open to let in the last of the natural light. The musty smell of abandonment stirred around him and started to trickle out into the open air. Iris had gone back outside and was sitting in the snow a few yards from the edge of the lake, drawing figure eights with a rock. Augustine found a boulder to sit on and stayed with her there for a moment, taking in the view. He was filled with a sense of relief. The journey had been worth it. They had made it. There would be no return trip, and yet—he felt safe there. Without the shadow of the evacuation, the looming emptiness of the hangar and the runway, this place felt more like an oasis than a place of exile.
The sun was already gone, captured by the mountains that circled the lake, and the sky had deepened to a dark blue. There would be plenty of time for exploring in the coming days. They sat in silence and listened to the ice. A wolf howled somewhere far away, and then another answered from the other side of the lake. Still they sat. Full darkness settled and a snowy owl swooped overhead, landing on one of the antenna poles, where it watched the two humans with curiosity. Stars began to prickle in the sky above them.
“Hungry?” Augustine asked, and Iris nodded. “I’ll make something,” he said, and slowly, stiffly rose from his boulder. He was looking forward to sleeping on the cot—it would be no worse than the nest they’d made in the observatory and much, much better than the frozen ground they’d spent the last few nights on. As he approached the hut, he saw the glow from the kerosene lamps illuminating the walls and the flicker of their flames from just inside the threshold. He was glad they’d come.
Inside, he started the oil stove, but he left the door unfastened so that Iris could slip through when she was done communing with the first body of water she’d seen in—well, he didn’t know how long. He hadn’t seen water since flying over the fjords on his way back to the observatory outpost after his last vacation, over a year ago now. The frozen lake was a reminder of a gentler season fast approaching. He closed his eyes and imagined how it would look in a month, when the midnight sun had risen and the trickle of spring had found its way to them. He imagined the softness of the mud, the virility of grass poking up through the barren land, the liquid glass of the melted surface, and it filled him with a sense of serenity. He could stop fighting the landscape, just for a moment, just this once. Since the evacuation, since Iris, he had felt more earthbound than he had in years. There was a time when the changes in the sky meant more to him than the ground beneath his feet, but not right then. He had been looking up for long enough; it felt good to think of the dirt instead, to imagine the life that would soon return to the land.
As the stove began to warm the hut, Augustine shed a few layers and rummaged through the boxes and packages stacked around the gas range. There was an abundance of food, and he suspected that one of the other huts would have an even larger store packed away for the long winters and rare supply runs a location like this would get. He found a skillet, sticky with old grease and dust, and rinsed it in a tin basin with water from the big insulated tank in the corner of the tent. When he set the skillet down on the hot range, the moisture began to spit and crackle. He emptied a can of corned beef hash into the pan, and when the hash was brown and crisp, he flipped it out onto two plates and scrambled some powdered eggs. There was an enormous can of instant coffee and both condensed and powdered milk—what riches, Augie thought—and while Iris began to eat he set some water to boil for coffee, then sat down beside her.
“Is it all right?” he asked her, and she nodded her approval between big bites of hash.