Jesse ran in behind him, his face red, and grabbed Harry’s wrist as if to hold him back. Harry twisted free. ‘You realize,’ he shouted, ‘that it’s an offence to disobey direct orders from your acting commander.’ Igor and Eliot entered the room behind him. ‘Igor said that you weren’t to touch the service module. We were ordered to leave. To return home.’
‘I know—’ Eliot stepped between Harry and Astrid, his hands up as if to defend her. ‘But we just couldn’t.’
‘Couldn’t obey orders,’ Fae said, her face pale. ‘Back on Earth, this would be considered mutiny.’
‘That’s right,’ said Harry. ‘You’d be court-martialled.’
Astrid stood up. Poppy could tell that she was stunned by their reaction. It was the exact opposite of the one she had been expecting. ‘But we saved you all.’
‘Saved us?’ Juno’s voice was simmering with rage. They had all entered the room now, everyone but Commander Sheppard, who was still unconscious in the infirmary. It felt strange to gather like this without him.
‘Do you realize what was about to happen?’ Astrid asked. ‘Do you realize what we were about to do? Leave this ship. Leave Igor – I mean, Commander Bovarin – and Fae and Cai and Sheppard to die. Go home. Only it’s not home anymore. If we stepped out now, do you think we’d have a chance to go to Terra-Two ever again? Do you think they’d choose us? All those years of work, everything we did would be wasted. Our whole lives…’
‘It will be wasted when we die here!’ Harry shouted.
‘Astrid was just doing what she thought was right,’ Jesse said.
‘No.’ Juno slammed her fist against a desk. ‘Astrid was just doing what she wanted. Being selfish and reckless.’
Astrid let out a cry of indignation, and stepped closer to her sister. ‘Do you even want to be here, Juno?’
‘What?’
‘On this ship. On this mission. Did you ever really want to go to Terra-Two or did you just want to go because I wanted to go? Because you’ve never been able to stand being alone. You slept in my bed until you were twelve.’ The expression of betrayal on Juno’s face made Poppy ache. ‘Maybe this is what this is about,’ Astrid continued. ‘You went to Dalton because you need me. Not because you have a higher purpose.’
‘Oh, and you do?’
‘There’s a whole planet waiting for us, Juno. This is our only chance to go there. And you’re all too cowardly to fight for it.’
‘Die for it, you mean,’ said Juno. ‘Do you realize what you’ve chosen for us, now? The Russian expedition still haven’t responded to our message. We only have a few weeks of oxygen left. They might not come in time. Or at all.’
‘They will.’
‘You better hope so. Because if you’re wrong, it’ll be your fault. You’ll have all of our deaths on your hands.’
‘We have three months of oxygen,’ Eliot reminded them.
‘No, we don’t have three months,’ Fae said. She sank down in the chair next to Poppy and put her fingers between her eyebrows as if she was nursing a headache. ‘The volume of this ship is larger than the volume of the shuttle. So the partial pressure of oxygen will already be a lot lower. We have half that time or less, because once the oxygen is lower than 50 per cent of normal levels, we’ll start to die.’ Her words made dread and bile creep up in Poppy’s throat.
‘Remember what we learned in Sunday school about the Israelites?’ Astrid said to her sister in a low voice, taking her face in her hands, willing her to recall it. ‘Who trekked for generations in the desert, or the Mayflower pilgrims who crossed an ocean in the winter to found a new country. History will remember us. This is the day our descendants will sing about and rejoice.’
‘The Mayflower pilgrims were religious nuts, and half of them died of scurvy, pneumonia or tuberculosis,’ Juno listed on her fingers. ‘And that land that they found—’
‘What happened to your faith, Juno? Did you think this would be easy?’
‘Can I be the first one to say,’ Harry interrupted, ‘that I have no plans to die here, or for this mission. Not now, or ever. And going back to Earth – going back home – would it really be so bad?’
‘This isn’t a holiday, Harry,’ Astrid said, letting go of Juno and narrowing her eyes in disgust. ‘It’s not some ski trip you can return from when the going gets tough.’
‘You made damned sure of that, didn’t you,’ Harry said, his voice low and deadly.
‘Please stop,’ Poppy pleaded and they all fell silent, bristling in the glacial light of Europa. Poppy’s head spun with confusion. She didn’t want to go back to Earth either, and the thought of leaving half of the crew to die on the ship had broken her heart.
‘I’m glad they did it,’ Jesse finally said. ‘I feel like an idiot for not helping. I can’t believe I thought I could leave Igor and Fae and Cai and Commander Sheppard to die here. Could you?’
‘I know what you mean,’ Poppy said quietly. ‘Sitting on that shuttle a week from now knowing that our crewmates were suffocating to death.’ Fae put her head in her hands, and Cai looked as if the thought made him ill.
‘We’re the senior crew,’ Igor said. His voice was raspy, and he stopped a moment to cough into a handkerchief. ‘This—’ He coughed again. ‘T-this is a choice that we made to give you the best chance.’ Poppy noticed little petals of blood blooming on the cotton fabric in his fist.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Jesse said, turning to him. ‘But it wasn’t our choice.’
‘It wasn’t yours to make,’ Igor said, his teeth gritted with fury.
‘They’ve given up enough,’ Eliot said. ‘Igor gave up the rest of his life for this mission. Sheppard left his wife and baby behind. Fae clearly never wanted to be here in the first place.’
‘That’s right,’ Astrid said, her eyes pleading for understanding. She looked at Igor and then Fae and Cai. ‘Please understand, Commander Bovarin. I know we’re supposed to listen to orders. And I almost always do, but this time…’ she took a shaky breath. ‘This time there was too much to lose.’
‘I’ve heard enough of this. I say we punish her,’ Harry said, crossing his arms.
‘How?’ asked Jesse, looking to Igor, then back to Harry, whose fists were still clenched. ‘Throw her overboard like pirates?’
‘On Mars, the punishment for a serious offence, up to and including mutiny, is confinement,’ Juno said.
Jesse snorted in disbelief. ‘You mean lock her up?’
‘That’s exactly what she means,’ Harry said, stabbing a finger at Eliot and Astrid. ‘Both of them.’
‘She’s your sister, and this isn’t a prison,’ Jesse said, then turned to Juno. ‘What happened to doing things differently?’
Juno folded her arms. ‘We have to maintain the rule of law amongst ourselves. Otherwise, anything goes. She might be my sister, but we’re all brothers and sisters here and Astrid betrayed us.’
‘The rule of law.’ Jesse snorted. ‘Oh, this is about your plan to build a utopia by getting us all to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules you invented. Like that’s never happened in human history before.’
‘We have a chance to do it right this time,’ Juno said, although she looked a little wounded. ‘And I thought you believed in the Damocles Document. In making a better world?’
‘I believe in you. But, don’t you even realize what utopia means? It means – here’s a fun fact – it means “no place”. Somewhere that doesn’t exist. There is no place where humans stop being humans. We’re going to fight wherever we go, we’re going to argue. In the future, we’ll fuck our children up, and drill holes into the ground and spill oil in the sea. We’ll make mistakes.’