Chapter Text
Jade didn’t have the luxury of falling to pieces, blinking back tears as she started the launch sequence. She could feel her heart tear in half as the rockets fired, the crushing pressure of G force nothing compared to the lead in the pit of her stomach every time she saw the empty seat in the module. Kit’s seat. They hadn’t even been able to find the body, the debris and the storm hurling her somewhere beyond hope of recovery.
All she’d ever wanted was to be an astronaut. To explore in space. Now she had, and she hated it.
Kit opened her eyes to a blaring alarm from her suit, and three foot of antenna jutting from her abdomen. That probably wasn’t ideal. At least it explained why her stomach was on fire.
Somehow she forced herself to her feet, trying to get her bearings. One very large reference point was nowhere to be seen. One hand trying to take the weight of the metal spike in her gut Kit stared at where the rocket had last been, the chaos slowly reassembling to memories. The storm. The lift off. Without her.
She was broken, bloody, and alone on Mars.
Elora found Airk by the porthole, staring back at the slowly disappearing planet in their wake.
“I left her.”
“Suit data showed no vital signs, Airk. She was gone, and wouldn’t want any of us to die for her.”
Airk nodded reluctantly, but he didn’t move from his vigil.
“Try to get some rest,” the flight medic told him, and left to check in on the commander. Airk wasn’t the only one torturing himself. Jade had barely slept since their departure. She couldn’t be allowed to go on like this if they wanted to make it safely back to Earth.
Commander Ballentine had faced many terrible things, but the grief of Sorsha Tanthalos was something he’d hoped never to see again. Losing a husband to the perils of space exploration was one thing. Losing a child was another. So when he saw the satellite planner surveying the abandoned HAB for apparently ghoulish reasons he’d come down on her like the wrath of hellfire itself. Until she pointed out the changes. The movement. There was no mistaking it. Kit Tanthalos was alive on Mars. No comms, no transport, no hope of rescue. The storm would have been a less cruel death.
Kit counted the meal packs laid out before her and counted them again, side still throbbing with every move. There was no getting around it. She’d starve to death long before the next mission landed. They would never know the truth, not unless they happened to return to this site, find her desiccated carcass, watch back the video diary.
Maybe she shouldn’t do that to them. Maybe she should just pack everything back up how it was and walk out onto the surface. Spare them the pain. Spare her. Dying would be quick and easy and painless. Living took effort.
“Did Willow seem strange to you on that last message?” Graydon asked, and Boorman shrugged.
“It’s Willow. He’s a strange bloke. Wouldn’t you say?”
There was a pause, and then a distant “hmmm” from Airk. The two exchanged a worried look. Jade had turned into a machine, to the point Boorman had joked she might just be a prototype android, and then Elora had punched him in the kidney with medical accuracy. Airk had gone the other way, swallowed by grief. That wasn’t an option in the depths of space. They had lost one Tanathlos. They wouldn’t lose both.
There were infinite ways to die on Mars. Keeping the Hab habitable had been an effort with a full crew of five. Every time Kit suited up to clear the solar panels, to keep the heat going, it got that little bit harder. Why drag it out? Why fight the inevitable and die slow? Open the door and step out. Take that whole vial of painkillers. Let the heat go out and fade away. So many ways she wouldn’t even feel it. Could finally rest. Could finally see dad again.
It's not like anyone could tell her not to.
Kit examined the puncture wound in the mirror, almost disappointed not to see the signs of infection. It would have made things simple at least. It was an ugly, raw wound still, too shallow to kill her outright, and now not even having the decency to give her a way out. She pressed a them against her clumsy staples and hissed in pain. Elora would have done a better job. The fuck was she supposed to do? She was a botanist, for fuck’s sake!
Kit stopped.
She was a fucking botanist.
And she had potatoes.
I am not dying here.
Kit scrawled a shaky 1 on the board, trying not to stretch her aching midsection.
- Don’t die.
- Stock check. Potatoes
- Don’t die.
- Contact Earth. Cancel gym membership.
- Don’t die.
- Tell Jade you love her.
Kit stared at the last point on the board and then quizzically at the pen. That was probably the painkillers talking. She raised a hand to rub it out, and then stopped. It was a good plan. A very good plan. She’d just sleep off a little of this fuzziness and then she’d get to putting it into action.
Soil. Water. Light. The plan felt like a fever dream. Kit triple checked the maths, the science, carefully shaving precious pieces from Graydon’s wooden flute. The only thing on Mars that would burn. She’d apologise, if she ever got the chance. It would work. It had to work.
One explosion and two less eyebrows later Kit limped back to the camera, scorched and smoking, side screaming. She’d pulled a staple loose and her ears were still ringing. Oxygen. She exhaled oxygen. Fuck the fucking maths. She’d go again just as soon as the world stopped spinning more than it should.
The hidden bonus to burning her eyebrows off was that the stench couldn’t stick to them. Kit was still dry heaving after the second shower. From the calorie side it wasn’t like she could afford to puke. But the condensation was beading on the plastic sheeting, and the potatoes were planted in the…Kit gagged a little, and then tried to regain her composure for the sake of the camera.
“When I get back to Earth, Elora owes me the…” Kit stopped, blinked. “Huh. I said “when”. Fuck me, optimism.” She gave a wry smile. “Hope I’m not full of shit.”
At least Jade hadn’t liked disco music. Kit was pretty sure she’d have walked out the airlock if she’d been left listening to disco music. It was bad enough moving around with a still healing gut wound. Having to manhandle her crew’s literal shit to give her a fighting chance of survival. Being left alone to die on a barren rock all alone. But at least if she did snap and go for a stroll without her suit it wouldn’t be because the music drove her to it.
Listening to it almost made it feel like Jade was there.
Almost.
Some days were harder to get out her bunk than others. But the day she let herself stay down was the day she started to give up. She couldn’t let that start to build momentum. That would kill her as surely as the hostile planet. On those days she let herself dig out the crew’s abandoned clothing, wearing Airk’s jumper like a hug, wrapping Jade’s blanket round her. She could do this. She would do this. There was a plan, after all. Point four was starting to take ridiculous, improbable shape. But surviving had been improbable enough, so fuck it.
Elora’s voice made Jade jump.
“Can you two at least pick a window to stare out together so I don’t have to chase you all over the ship?”
Jade glared, but Elora stepped into Jade’s space. Despite being taller, broader, and outranking her, Jade stepped back.
“She was my friend too.” The words cut Jade to the core. “You had to make that call down there, to only lose her. Now my job is to get you to sleep, and Airk to eat, to make sure everyone you kept alive gets home safe. And I take that just as seriously.”
There was something about pinning all her hopes of life on an obsolete, by decades, piece of long buried kit that really took the shine out of the first manned Martian road trip. Once she would have been overjoyed to be the first to see each rock and crater. Today she just winced at every bump, each jolt. If the rover broke down…well. There was plan Z. Plan A had flown away and plan B had more going for it, but the option of plan Z was ever present. No plan Z. I am not dying here. This will work.
Mars was a space junk graveyard. Sixty years of spacecraft, probes, rovers launched at their nearest planetary neighbour. Robotic trailblazers on the path that had led to the aborted Ares III mission. Left Kit with the unenviable record of being the first person on a planet alone, staring down the barrel of being the first Martian corpse.
There was no hope of cobbling together a launcher from the obsolete craft. They had never been designed to return, intended to be left to the Martian sands. But they had been built to communicate, the dusty consoles back on Earth never decommissioned.
Nothing hurt like hope. Days of travel, digging the ancient spacecraft out from under decades of dust, hauling it back across Mars hadn’t exactly been pleasant, but the wait was agony. Despair bled in like a leak in her suit, hope curdling in her gut.
The camera rose like a sunrise, spinning, taking in the question board Kit had staked up.
It turned to yes.
Kit punched the air, howling a victory yell there wasn’t anyone in a million miles to hear, blinking back the tears inside her helmet.
The thinnest, most fragile lifeline was now stretched across the stars.