It did look like a bear, crouching with its head turned away.
Trevor hummed, softly so as not to attract unwelcome attention from the others. It was too cramped to tap his feet, but he cracked the joints in his toes to the beat of the music in his head. The rockhopper’s wheels bumping over Martian rocks set up a syncopated percussion line, and inside his head, Negative Ions accompanied it with a stomp soundtrack:
4
Comparisons
It was all his fault.
John Radkowski thought about his brother like a dog worrying at a wound, knowing that it hurts, but unable to keep from chewing at it.
Karl had been a hero, not him. In the moment of truth, he had failed to speak up. He had run.
And now, he had not run far enough. The expedition was failing; his leadership was failing, and it was all his fault.
It was his fault.
His fault.
To the others in the crew, the expedition to Mars was the fulfillment of a dream. From childhood they had wanted to see the small blue planet dwindle to no more than one bright star among a million others, and know that they were on their way, part of something larger than themselves, the expansion of humanity into the cosmos.
John Radkowski had not looked at the stars. His brother Karl had told him what to do: Get out of the projects, get away from the gangs, go as far away from here as you can get and don’t ever look back.
To John Radkowski, leading the expedition to Mars was nothing more than following his brother’s instructions. And, driving across the desolation, he had only one thought:
What would Karl do?
5
The Calculus of Sacrifice
Estrela drove her dirt-rover as far and as fast as she could. She barely paid any attention to the scenery, and she had turned her radio to the “emergency only” setting, where only a priority-one page would beep through to her.
Estrela had some thinking to do.
When Ryan Martin had proposed his plan, she had instantly noticed the huge and disturbing fact that Ryan failed to present to the rest of the crew. She knew the Jesus do Sul very well. She, more than anybody else, knew that at its heart Brazil was still a poor country, and that the mission had no luxuries, nothing extra—not even the capability to return more than few grams of Martian dust.
The margin that Ryan Martin had been counting on did not exist.
The Brazilian Mars mission hadn’t been designed to carry samples back. Perhaps once, in the optimistic days when first the mission had been designed, the sample return had been real. But by the time that Jesus do Sul was being built, Brazil was in the slow process of national bankruptcy. There was no money for extras. Jesus do Sul was, first and foremost, a public-relations mission, designed to show off the expertise of an insolvent nation in a desperate attempt to attract investors from outside, richer nations. The well-publicized two hundred kilograms of rocks to be returned, the weight that Ryan had counted on leaving behind, was a carefully crafted fiction.
The Brazilian ship had not been designed to carry back even one kilogram of rocks. João had explained it all to her one evening, slowly and patiently. With any extra payload it would fail to get into orbit. The Brazilians had sent an expedition of two; they could return an expedition of two. Two astronauts, and not a kilogram more, was what their return ship was capable of launching home.
She had remained silent. If Ryan Martin did not mention to the crew that his plan could, at best, only save two of them, why should she?
The fact that he had left it out frightened her as much as anything else. It showed that he knew that their situation was desperate, and that in his opinion sacrificing some members of the crew would be an improvement on their current situation. He was afraid that the crew would panic if they knew. At that moment, she knew that they must be very close to death.
Could it possibly be that he didn’t know? The specifications of the Jesus do Sul were not public knowledge. Could he possibly believe that they could cram five people into a ship that had been designed for two? It seemed unlikely.
Estrela turned her head to take a sip from the nipple of the drinking bottle. The suits had not been designed for long-term use; until she took her helmet off, the electrolyte-replacement drink would be the only nourishment she’d get. She reminded herself not to suck too much; it would have to last. But the thought only made her thirstier.
The alternative was slightly more sinister. Suppose that Ryan Martin did know that only two of them could return to Earth. Could he have a reason to keep this fact secret?
Clearly, he intended to be one of those persons.
A trek to the north pole would be an ambitious traverse even for a fully functional, well-planned mission. It would take the skills of the full team of five to make it. Once they got to the north pole, though, three of the five must somehow be persuaded to remain on Mars. The easiest way to do that would be to make sure that three of them were already dead.
She knew what it was like to have to kill for her life. When it comes to a matter of life or death, anybody would learn to lie and to kill.
Any way she looked at it, Ryan Martin looked to her like a killer.
6
A Childhood in Rio
Whenever anybody would ask her where she came from, Estrela Carolina Conselheiro would tell them she was from Ipanema. “I’m the girl from Ipanema,” she said, tossing her head and smiling. “Just like in the song.”
It was a lie. She was from Rio, yes, but although the mother she could barely remember had given birth to her no more than ten kilometers from the chic restaurants and boutiques of the Visconde de Piraja, Ipanema might as well have been farther away than the moon.
Most of her history was a lie. She had not grown up sheltered, staying out of public schools with a private tutor. Her parents, she said, had been an artist and a successful businesswoman who had been killed in the earthquake and fire of 2009, the same fire that destroyed her birth records. It was quite plausible. Earthquakes are so uncommon in Brazil that the 2009 earthquake, catching Rio completely unprepared, had devastated a large portion of the city, including many records. It was also completely untrue.
She had grown up on the streets. She had her virginity taken away by age seven, and seen her first man killed with a knife at age nine. All she knew about the beaches of Ipanema was that, if you were caught shoplifting there, after they shot you they would take your body up to Madureira to dump it, so as not to frighten the tourists away.
Her brother Gilberto had taught her how to read. He had been all the family she ever had. “You have to learn to read, Estrela,” he had told her. “Then, one day, when you’ve become rich, we’ll kill them all.” His smile gleamed in the dim light. He had been completely serious.
But there was no way they would ever become rich.
They survived by stealing, begging, selling drugs for the gangs when they could, and going through garbage when there was nothing to steal and nothing to beg and no European tourists to sell drugs to. When there was no garbage, they ate nothing. Gilberto would offer to sell her body when he thought he could find a taker who would pay for the thrill of sex with a girl not yet even close to puberty, but most of the customers he offered her to would only curl up their lips in disdain. There was little market for a whore that was starved and dirty and probably diseased.