Agamemnon lay before them.
“We’re here,” Tana said, almost in a whisper.
Ryan looked up. “We’re here. It’s here!”
Estrela, trailing behind, echoed in a whisper, “Here. Here!”
The Agamemnon camp was spread out. The Agamemnon lander itself sat a kilometer off to the east, a squashed hemispherical shell sitting on its heat shield and surrounded by the shreds of its airbag cushion like a half-melted mushroom. Spread all around were the remains of the encampment: the abandoned fuel-manufacturing plant and its electrical generator plant; two bubble habitats, long deflated; a toolshed; a domed greenhouse module; a half dozen scientific stations; communications antennae; a sheet metal quonset hut; piles of trash and discarded equipment; electrical and data cables spread spaghetti-style across the ground. No one from the doomed Agamemnon had bothered to be neat; they were too worried about survival.
Every horizontal surface was covered with a layer of dust.
There was no hope that Agamemnon’s electrical generating plant would still work, but the bubble habitats both seemed intact. Over the six years they had been on Mars the gas that had originally inflated them had slowly leaked away, but when Ryan checked, they were still intact.
Using the Agamemnon camp was a risk. If any of the original fungus had survived the six years on Mars and was still viable, and still virulent, they could face a repeat of the runaway infection that had ultimately led to the Agamemnon disaster. In theory it would not survive the six years without a host. In theory, even if it survived, it would not colonize healthy humans. In theory, even if it did, they had the pharmaceuticals to be prepared for it this time. In theory.
But they had little choice.
Ryan salvaged several solar array panels from the lander, and after cleaning away the dust layers, found them still functioning. It would be enough power to provide heat and light for the habitat.
And, if the transmitters still functioned, enough to communicate with Earth.
“We’ve got a new camp, crew,” Ryan announced. He should have felt triumph. Instead, all he felt was weary. “And it looks like everything still works.”
4
The Minions
Through grade school Ryan had built model rockets, taught himself calculus and aerodynamics, built his own telescope and a special tracking platform for it so he could watch the Russian space station Mir when it passed overhead and plan for the day when he, too, would be up there, looking down on Canada from above. In high school his science fair project, a gyroscopic stability system for a model rocket, had won a prize and a scholarship, enough that, along with earnings from an outside job programming computers to recognize speech, he could afford to go to MIT.
To Ryan, being an undergraduate at MIT had been like being at a banquet with each course more appetizing than the last. Finally he was stimulated to stretch his limits, and sometimes to exceed them.
At the end of his freshman year, Ryan got involved with a project to fly a student-designed satellite. He volunteered for the task of building the control system. It was a small but intensely dedicated team.
They had two unofficial mottoes. The first was, “It doesn’t have to be good—it does have to be done.” The second was, “We don’t need no stinkin’ sleep!” Everybody else called them the satellite gang, but to one another, they were the Minions of the Satellite God. They made a pact with each other: The satellite came first. Everything else—their sleep, their health, their grades, their lives—came second.
Their satellite flew as a secondary payload on a Delta rocket, hitchhiking its way into space with a free ride on the third stage of a rocket whose main mission was to put a communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit. The entire gang went to Florida for the launch, crammed into a battered Volvo station wagon. They stayed, eight of them in one room, at a cheap hotel on Cocoa Beach. It was the first time Ryan had ever been so far south.
The launch was on a cold and cloudy day. The wind was so high that they had been certain that the launch would be canceled, but they went out to the public beach with their binoculars, their cameras, and a small battery-powdered radio. The tide line was covered with seaweed and the drying corpses of Portuguese men-of-war, improbably bright blue balloons slowly deflating in the air.
The Delta had launched on the exact second the launch window opened. It climbed silently into the air, the light of the solid rocket boosters sparkling a trail across the choppy water, almost too bright to look directly at, and then vanished into the clouds. For a few seconds the cloud glowed with the light of the booster, and then it faded, and there was nothing left but the empty pad and the white smoke.
Only then did the sound come rolling across the water, a roar so intense that you could feel it as well as hear it. And then that, too, faded into the distance, and there was only the surf and the seagulls.
Not one of the Minions was old enough to drink, so when the announcement came that the launch had been a success, they celebrated by pouring grape juice over each other.
The satellite—and more particularly Ryan’s control systems—worked perfectly, taking photographs of the polar aurorae for over a year.
Ryan spent that year going to classes when he had to, but never far enough away from the satellite control center that he could not be paged to return at an instant’s notice.
The control center consisted of a few computers and a fast Internet connection hooked up in a windowless room in the basement of the wind tunnel building. With the launch, the tight group of the Minions began to drift away to other projects and other concerns. Dave left for a year in Israel, Darlene got involved in a new project in the physics department, Anu quit to start up a software firm and become a millionaire, Steve got married and stopped coming around, and Ted simply declared that he needed to spend time on coursework, and wasn’t about to let the satellite run his life.
There were new undergraduates to help out, bright-eyed and eager, but of the original Minions, only Ryan stayed with the project to the end. Whenever anything went wrong, Ryan was there to debug the problem and design a work-around for it. They found that he had a talent for visualizing orbital mechanics, and an almost mystical understanding of the secret world of torque wheels and magnetic dampers and predictive control systems. He could figure out, from the slightest bump in a chart, which part was failing, how the underperformance was affecting the satellite, and what was needed to write a software patch to keep the satellite running.
For Ryan, it was not just a student project. It was his life.
5
Calling Home
It was a task that Ryan dreaded, but there was no help for it. Agamemnon expedition had left behind a complete set of high-bandwidth communications gear and a gimbaled high-gain antenna. He had to call Earth.
After inflating the Agamemnon’s main operations habitat, it took him an hour to get the communications gear powered up and to reset the computer to calculate the position of the Earth and adjust the antenna to track it. He almost hoped that the antenna would fail to lock on to the Earth; fixing that would give him another few hours to avoid making the connection. But no such luck.
At least he didn’t have to do it alone. He called in Estrela and Tana. “We’re all in this together,” he said. “Ready?”