The Martian 2

Time: 4.4 1943 Hours

I woke up colder than a beer in Antarctica. My responses were slow, like wading through thick molasses, heavy and sluggish, unable to break free from my mental lethargy. For a long moment, I couldn’t grasp where I was, my mind a fog of confusion.

Then, like a dim light slowly brightening in a dark room, realization dawned on me—I was inside my hibernation cocoon. Something yellow dangled in front of my face, and I squinted my eyes, trying to make sense of it.

“That’s out of place,” a vague recollection whispered in the recesses of my groggy mind. My teeth chattered uncontrollably, the bitter cold seeping into every fiber of my being within the cocoon tube like an icy breeze enveloping me.

Hibernation lowers body temperature ten degrees; fine for controlled deactivation, but deadly now. Time to engage. My thoughts move with the speed of mud but I knew I had to act.

With arms and legs cramped up, I reached out with clumsy hands, my fingers grazing the yellow object with numb tips. Slowly, my memory started to piece together the situation—the Mars V lander, the mission trip, the emergency oxygen air mask.

Unlike the last three times I woke up from hibernation, this was not a drill. The emergency air-mask in front of me deployed within the tube automatically in the event of a loss of cabin pressure inside the Mars V ship.

Eighteen seconds. That’s how long you’ve got before your brain shuts down from lack of oxygen. I’m not a fan of brain shutdowns, so I slapped the mask on as fast as my frozen fingers would allow. I then jerked the clear, plastic tube running to it. Oxygen flooded in. Hello, sweet air.

Finally, on pure oxygen my mind started coming back online, and I could proceed with the next mission goal—donning my spacesuit. That's the fun part: suiting up inside a glorified coffin. One has to put it on inside as you’d die putting it on outside in a vacuum.

The pieces were supposed to be placed in order of putting them on—diaper, cooling suit, comm cap, the works. Instead it looked like someone shook the box and said, “Good luck, sucker.”

My hands groped about as I awkwardly searched for the necessary pieces. I fought against the disarray and lack of room, trying to find the first piece to put on.

It took me several wasted moments to fumble about to find and put them on in proper order; the “snoopy” communications cap worn over the head with its earphones and microphone last.

Once I pulled the bottom half of the hard body spacesuit up around my waist, I temporarily removed the oxygen mask, then wormed my way up inside the top half of the hard suit, replaced the mask, and connected the communications cap plugins.

Next, turn on the suit’s oxygen, discard the temporary face mask, and put on the helmet, locking it into place with a turn of the collar ring. The cotton gloves and then the outer gloves go on last.

Systems online. Pressure good. Breathing good. Still alive.

For now.

I turned on the suit’s radio. “Comm's on.”

Immediately, other voices came over my snoopy.

“Anyone know what happened? The cabin pressure’s shot!” someone was saying.

“Wake-up call from hell,” another said.

“Are we there?”

Something had gone wrong. Really wrong.

I reached out for the handle and opened the sealed door of hibernation cocoon #7. I found myself staring out into utter blackness. Except for my cocoon’s dim battery lights for suiting up, the ship itself was in total darkness.

The others were opening up their cocoons, too. We turned on our helmet lamps to illuminate the inner ship, which normally resembles a five-seat wide jetliner except for having no seats, more sections, and more equipment.

Yet right now though, it looked and felt like the inside of an abandoned submarine on the bottom of the ocean. No lights were on anywhere—not even a digital clock. By our helmet lamps, a reddish dust floated in the air.

“Debris hit?” someone speculated.

That was the obvious explanation. Meteorites average 90,000 miles an hour and will go right through a ship and cause it to lose cabin pressure. This causes the oxygen masks to automatically deploy in the hibernating crew cocoons to wake the crew up, let them suit up, find the leak, and then fix it with glue and gauze. Routine.

But this wasn’t routine. Oh, at first, a meteorite hit did seem to be what happened here, the meteor being vaporized on impact into the floating reddish dust. Except why was the ship dark?

None of us expected to awake in total blackness. That never happened in our repair simulations. The ship had backup power and redundancy systems for everything. Yet no lights came on when we tried them. Except for the battery-powered cocoons lights, we had no power in the ship at all—none.

Under our helmet beams, I could make out amongst all the equipment strewn everywhere that the faint trace of reddish dust drifted in from the aft section.

This feels wrong… nobody's talking, just silently wondering. Lonely. Cutoff.

The escaping air of the hull breach was sucking the dust back out towards itself. That would put the hole ahead near my duty station. I turned to move there in my bulky, slow-moving suit. Two other crew members were trying to move past me aft to theirs and I waited for them to get by.

I could hear the nearly inaudible hiss of more cocoon doors opening as the rest of the team joined us, their helmet lights flickering on to life, casting eerie beams of illumination as they too assessed the grim situation. It's not supposed to look like this in our simulations. Yet this was not a simulation.

I explored my surroundings with my own light, with wide eyes and an open mouth. Utter chaos reigned around us. Loose items and equipment were strewn about haphazardly, evidence of a violent impact.

It was beyond unnerving; this was the kind of scene we’d been warned about only in hushed tones—the type of catastrophe only spoken about in worst-case drills, an event that might never happen. My mind struggled to comprehend what size meteorite could have possibly caused such devastation.

Everyone's too quiet. The sound of my own breathing inside my helmet wants to drown me.

“Vat... is this?” I heard Woravka's Russian's voice over his suit radio ask of the mess.

I recognized First Lieutenant Commander Roberta Toner climbing out of cocoon #2 and met her. “We’ve got a breach,” I relayed, voice steady as I waded through the debris. “Forward section, near my station.”

She nodded inside her helmet and stared apprehensively at the drifting dust in the air. Hull breach simulations were etched into our memories, but none of them prepared us for the actual reality. Somehow, this seemed far worse with all this amount of dust and disarray and an unexpected power loss.

I then heard her answer. “Report to your station. Find the leak. I'll join you.”

No such order was necessary. We were all doing so automatically out of conditioned training.

As the ship’s second lieutenant in charge of communications and navigation, my station was in the aft bridge just behind the cockpit. While I made my way ahead to join Captain Hatton there for further instruction.

Fellow Second Lieutenant Woravka, our flight engineer, moved by me, headed towards the stern section to reach his own station.

In these suits, our pace was slow. That reddish dust still floated in the air from aft. To be that much, the ugly realization hit me—the ship had suffered a catastrophic hull breach. No pebble did this.

Our lights revealed the aftermath of the chaos. To be without power, our ship would be left drifting in the cold, merciless expanse of space, with no way to call for help, and possibly with no way to fix the damage.

The unspoken uncertainty as everyone assumed their stations spoke volumes, their helmets turning left and right to take it all in, searching for answers. This was definitely not good.

But we had no time to dwell on those feelings. Survival became our priority, and training automatic. We had to act quickly and efficiently if we wanted to repair the leak.

First Lieutenant Roberta Toner joined me in the dark, eerie interior of the bridge section. Her duty station was in the cockpit just ahead and likely the site of the breach. Like me, she expected to find Captain Hatton here, but he had not yet arrived in my section. Fortunately, we did not need him to find the breach and patch it. We were all trained for it.

My own bridge station appeared intact. There was no hole but nothing worked. No power. Family picture gone. The hull damage was not here. As I stood there, Roberta Toner entered the cockpit. Above the door, someone had painted the words Lady be good in pale yellow.

Suddenly, she halted, then waved a glove for me, her other hand pointing silently into the cockpit, indicating you really need to see this. I could see by her eyes, fixed on something ahead, unblinking, that what she was looking at was something we were never trained for.

Moving over to see what she pointed at. I expected to see the leak. Instead, I saw something... someone in there—a body. Whoever he was, he was dead, smeared all over the bridge. Blood was everywhere.

I failed to recognize him—and maybe that was for the best. He looked like he’d been hit by a train as I felt a surge of nausea. Possibly once a friend, a comrade—now just a hollow shell, robbed of life’s spark. He wasn’t even wearing a spacesuit.

“Captain Hatton, to the bridge,” I called to notify him. “Repeat! Captain Hatton to the bridge.”

Something had bent the cabin floor and twisted it at an odd angle—up and to the left. What could do that?

Odd, the ship should be spinning, tumbling from the impact.

Yet nothing.

“Forward breach,” I told the others listening said into comms, voice flat. “Cockpit compromised.”

“Got a breach, alright,” Woravka reported, our flight engineer, over the radio. “And Captain Hatton’s MIA.”

I gave the warped deck another lookover. Definitely a bad sign, yet I still saw no leak. I went back to find Captain Hatton when he didn’t answer. He must have gone aft with the others.

“Captain Hatton? Woravka here. I am at my station. We have a serious problem.”

Woravka must have discovered the reason for the power failure at his station and it was not good. I could almost hear the echo of our mission briefing: the engineers assuring us we’d be safe, that every emergency protocol had been calculated. Had we really ever believed that?

As soon as I exited the bridge, and navigated my way through the galley, I entered the midship bay area. By the light of my helmet lamp, I noticed one of the science team members, Vernon Moore, hurrying by me, his eyes wide as he moved in the opposite direction.

Science team members are not part of the crew and so have no duty stations. Their duties begin once we land on Mars. Basically, they are to stay out of our way until we get there. Then we stay out of theirs.

Woravka announced the bad news. “Source confirmed. Half the damn ship is gone Not damaged—gone. Like someone stole it.”

No one answered.

Just breathing. Loud. Too loud.

In the eerie silence, I peered aft at the incoming source of the dust. I could see Woravka there but I didn’t see Hatton. Yet what I saw then made my mouth dry. In stunned disbelief, my pupils widened. I could see the back half of the fuselage was gone. It had been completely torn off. The fuselage ended with nothing but a perfectly big, round hole. One big enough, and wide enough for three people to walk through.

Through that hole, the red dust still drifted in from outside to slowly settle at our feet. I stared at that gaping hole. A problem? Woravka called that a problem? We were a wreck! Glue and gauze would not fix this. Not even close. Not even in the same universe as “fix.”

“Is that the captain?” Roberta’s voice of wonder now came through my helmet, her words revealing her own surprise. Evidently, she referred to the corpse.

I said nothing back. I was still staring at that hole amidst the red dust. Half the ship had disappeared!

“Jesus Christ! What the hell happened?” someone demanded.

“My God! Look at that hole! How can we fix that?!”

“Where are we?”

“Hatton’s dead! He’s smeared all over the cockpit!” Roberta announced.

That was Hatton?

A wave of nausea rose within me.

“What do we do?” someone asked.

Captain Hatton dead? Our leader? I felt a fleeting recollection of his smile and his inspiring confidence. That smile—so familiar and so terribly absent now—haunted me, as if some spectral echo lingered, taunting with what we'd lost.

What do we do? I knew what we were going to do. The wave of helpless defeat that swept over me told me as I struggled to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster. Outside of a miracle, we were all going to die out here in space.

But why? What had happened here? And why was Captain Hatton out of his suit at the controls?

“Diary log; Time: 4.4 1943 hours Mars. Landing pretty well mixed up. We crashed. Can barely find what’s left of Hatton. All others present. No one else badly hurt.”