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  Baker smiles at Lockwood and gets slowly to his feet. "Keep talking, Brother Austin," he says. "Someday you and I are going to meet under very different circumstances."

  "Good. I'll buy you a lollipop."

  "You may be a big shot now, but once NASA is done with you, you'll be nothing. You understand me? I've seen this happen before. Once you get back to Earth, everything is going to be very different."

  "I hope so," Lockwood says. He is leaning over his plate, poised to maul the dense ball of sweet white fish meat caught in his chopsticks, seemingly entirely unperturbed by the bulk looming above him. "Because that, brother, is precisely what I'm counting on."

  Chapter 9

  Kennedy Space Center

  Launch Complex 39

  Merritt Island, Florida

  11:21 a.m.

  Lockwood is fully suited and strapped down on his back. He is staring up through an eight inch diameter window in the command module's boost protective cover at the blizzard outside. The snow is coming down so hard, it looks like static.

  Mark, T minus thirty seconds and counting, and the automatic sequence continues.

  These are the worst possible conditions for a launch. The winds coming in from the east are so high that, in the event of an early-stage abort, the command module and launch escape system could be blown back over land where Lockwood would experience a much higher-impact return to Earth than if he were to splashdown in the relatively soft and forgiving Atlantic[14]; the temperature is well below the point where the fuel tank joint seals could fail and either allow aerodynamic forces to get enough of a grip on the spacecraft to pull it apart in mid-flight, or cause all five million pounds of propellent to ignite in one instantaneous and spectacularly violent explosion rather than in the gradual and controlled form of combustion we call thrust; and finally, lightning could either strike the tower and follow the rocket's contrail up, or strike the spacecraft directly, potentially shorting out any number of critical systems, or — at several times the temperature of the surface of the Sun — causing any number of the more than five million moving parts that comprise the ascent engine alone to either melt or fuse.

  When one stops to think about everything that can go wrong, it starts getting hard to find your way back to the point where you imagine anything at all going right.

  Seventeen seconds. Swing arm back. We have guidance internal.

  But the forecast for the next twelve hours only gets worse, and any delay beyond twelve hours jeopardizes the entire mission. They have waited as long as they can possibly wait. They have postponed out the absolute limits of the schedule. If the first man to walk on Mars is to be an American, Lockwood must launch now.

  Ten. Nine. Eight. Ignition sequence start...

  He tries to convince himself that, to the Russians, these are probably perfectly acceptable launch conditions. Snow storms might even be considered auspicious at the Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The higher the winds, the lower the temperature, and the worse the visibility, the more glory there is to be won for the Motherland. Lockwood has never even met a cosmonaut, so he's making all this up right now to try to keep himself from dwelling on the recent news from CAPCOM[15] that the manual abort lever inside the capsule has been disabled — just in case he was starting to have second thoughts.

  Three. Two. One.

  In a world normally so capricious and unpredictable, Lockwood's current situation is starkly unambiguous: he will either go to Mars, or he will die trying.

  All engines running. Commit. Liftoff. We have a liftoff. Eleven twenty-two a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

  Lockwood feels himself moving, but the sensation of acceleration is completely overpowered by the shaking. The vibration is so intense that there's no way it can be right — no way it can be within design parameters. Lockwood remembers Noone saying that the Saturn VII shakes like a dog shitting razor blades, but this goes beyond any reasonable expectation.

  The clock is running.

  The little Hermes rocket Lockwood rode on his sub-orbital training flight certainly shook during liftoff, but not like this. There's no way the electronics can survive this amount of vibration. There's no way any living thing can survive it. Lockwood's eyes are clenched shut and he has to fight to take in a breath. Everything feels like it is being shaken apart around him, first into pieces, then those pieces down into smaller components, then those components down into tiny particles of dust. By the time he reaches orbit, there will be nothing left of Lockwood or his spacecraft but individual atoms of aluminum and silicon and carbon and oxygen — elements that were originally synthesized in the bellies of long-dead stars then ejected into space by their violent deaths where they traveled for billions of years to become the catalysts for the formation of a new star, and then a new solar system, and then new planets where life formed and evolved and technology arose that today catapulted Brother Austin Lockwood out into space for no other reason but to return his remains to the cosmos from whence they were borrowed for one brief and miserable and pathetic moment in the history of the cold and indifferent universe.

  The last thing Lockwood hears before losing consciousness is that he has cleared the tower.

  Chapter 10

  Vastitas Borealis

  Mars

  3:12 a.m. CST

  Lockwood hates it when Sarek is right. But right Sarek was.

  Other than four days of moderate to severe SAS (space adaptation syndrome) during which Lockwood puked sixteen times before finally applying one of the transdermal anti-nausea patches usually reserved for spacewalks to prevent astronauts from vomiting in their helmets and asphyxiating; and other than a great deal of tedium which he attempted to counter by playing weightless solitaire (frustrating almost beyond comprehension) and learning a few words of Chinese (comparatively easy); and other than a steep and unfortunate learning curve associated with the spacecraft's waste management system[16], the details of which will go with Lockwood to his grave and certainly will not be recounted here; other than those things, the process of getting to Mars had actually been surprisingly uneventful.

  The little nap Lockwood took during liftoff had been a result of G-LOC, or G-force Induced Loss of Consciousness — a condition experienced by some pilots and astronauts when sustained g-forces drain too much blood from their brains. Lockwood's brain — being by far the most active and resource-intensive organ in his body — requires abnormally high levels of oxygen, so nobody was particularly surprised when he trailed off in the middle of a status report and the flight surgeon jumped up out of his chair and, much to the delight of everyone in mission control including Flight Director Len Sarek, dramatically counted Lockwood out like a boxing referee. When Lockwood woke up about eight minutes later, he found himself parked in a nice stable Earth orbit at well over seventeen thousand miles per hour with Christopher Noone crooning in his ear whatever the opposite of a lullaby is:

  Good morning to you.

  You're a wimp and a fool.

  You've pissed in your spacesuit,

  And you're starting to drool.

  Two hours and a few good zero-G regurgitations later, Lockwood was pleased to discover that docking with the plasma propulsion system was actually much easier without all the stuck thrusters, micrometeoroids, and snapped brackets the simulation operators seemed to get so much pleasure out of. Additionally, the primary ignition procedure for the plasma stage worked exactly as designed which saved Lockwood from having to perform the manual coupling verification EVA. And finally, both the Martian orbital insertion sequence and the subsequent descent to the Martian surface were flawlessly automated to the point where Lockwood's primary contribution was staying the hell out of the way.

  Austin Lockwood — aerospace engineer, fox keeper, avid gamer, collector of illicit anime, and now fairly seasoned if reluctant astronaut — was officially the first human being in history to ever visit another planet. Unfortunately, the matter of getting home was still somewhat TBD[17].

  According to Hous
ton, the Zeus CSM overtook the Chinese spacecraft (which Prabs had christened Wūguī, or "The Turtle") about twenty-six hours ago. Lockwood had watched for it through the command module's windows, hoping to reassure himself that he wasn't the only human being stupid enough to come all the way out here, but after three full hours of staring through the little circle of starboard blackness, he was pretty sure nothing went by. Noone had just started a new shift, and reassured Lockwood that he probably just passed it too quickly, or his rotation was slightly off, or the light from the sun behind them just wasn't hitting the surface of the slower spacecraft in a way that effectively illuminated it. Or maybe Lockwood had simply blinked at the wrong moment. Regardless, recent communications between Wūguī and the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center had been intercepted and decrypted by the NSA who then translated, digested, summarized, re-encrypted, and relayed the intelligence to the good folks at NASA. The upshot, according to Noone, was that the Chinese were on schedule to land only about 170 meters from where Farmer One is, at this very moment, perched upon the barren, desolate, and thoroughly oxidized surface of the forth planet from the Sun. In the meantime, Lockwood's orders are to get his skinny ass outside and make some history before the Chinese land and do it first.

  * * *

  With an almost four minute radio delay, Lockwood is no longer in constant contact with Houston (once the delay exceeded each party's attention span — roughly twenty seconds — they gradually transitioned into a kind of batch system of updates), so Lockwood is acting more or less autonomously, relying on procedure checklists and warning lights to prevent him from accidentally killing himself. After verifying the integrity of his suit more times than any rational human being should feel compelled to do (much less a left-brain-oriented engineer), he begins working his way down the eleven-point checklist labeled "CABIN DEPRESS" which is Scotch-taped to the inside of the hatch. By the time he is finished, the lander is fully depressurized, the hatch is cracked, and his nice warm nitrogen- and oxygen-rich atmosphere has been replaced by carbon dioxide so cold that it doesn't really matter whether it's reported in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

  The light on Mars is a product of the burnt auburn landscape combined with the mustard-yellow sky. The scene is otherworldly, but not entirely unfamiliar. In fact, as Lockwood steps slowly and methodically out onto Farmer One's mesh porch, he can't help but feel like the entire mission could be a hoax — that he could just as easily be in the Mojave Desert as seventy million kilometers away from his blue and cloud-swirled home. As he stands there watching a dust devil move across the boulder-strewn terrain, it is almost impossible for him to believe that if he were to remove his helmet, rather than taking in a nice hot breath of dry desert air, his head would probably freeze solid before he could even choke to death on the thin poisonous air. The fact that he can hardly believe that he is not on Earth — that he can only make sense of what he is seeing in terms of that which he knows — suggests to Lockwood that humankind has once again accomplished something almost beyond its own powers of comprehension.

  Lockwood has given a lot of thought to the very first words to be uttered on the surface of another planet, although he fully realizes that there's really no point. He suspects that his message to the world has already been written and probably even recorded in a studio by an actor whose voice conveys much more of what it means to be an American than Lockwood's. It's even possible that his historical address will change over time in accordance with the current needs of the administration. It might go from inspirational and patriotic discourse, to an endorsement of a key candidate, to praise for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to the promotion of a low-carb sugar-free drink which provides hours of long-lasting energy without the crash.

  But whatever it is that NASA or the government of the United States or the highest bidder eventually dubs over the few brief seconds of footage captured by Lockwood's remote camera, it will not change the fact that the very first and last message Earth received as Lockwood's boot left the final rung of the lander's ladder and made the very first human imprint upon the surface of an alien world — a message listened to collectively thousands of times and analyzed with every piece of audio technology the government could get its hands on — was the one thing that absolutely nobody wanted to hear:

  Houston, we have a problem.

  Chapter 11

  Johnson Space Center

  Conference Room Aldrin

  Houston, Texas

  9:22 a.m.

  The slouched and thoroughly despondent figures of the Director, Sarek, Noone, Prabs, and The Digital Bitch are all tucked in under the conference room table beneath a thick blanket of stale cigarette smoke and something that started out as tension and urgency, but has since decayed into irritability and exasperation. Even though Sarek has had to excuse himself probably a dozen times already to urinate (his kidneys just aren't what they used to be), his intake of cold black coffee has not abated in the least.

  "I want. To go over this. One more time," the Director says without looking up. There is a calmness to her voice that can only come from intense but suppressed rage. "From the beginning. Starting with the moment of contact with the Martian surface."

  Sarek is already shaking his head. "What's the point, Ann? He's dead. He's gone. It's over. And we're not going to know why until we hear from the Chinese. Period. End of story."

  Prabs uses the cherry of his cigarette to jump-start a fresh one.

  "We are not leaving this room," the Director tells Sarek, "until we have at least one viable theory."

  "We have a theory," Noone interjects. They have all been locked up together for so long that a little insubordination is to be expected. "It was either a mechanical failure or a dust devil. Either way, the little bastard's gone."

  "Ok," the Director tells Noone. "So let's figure out which one it was. What did the weather look like from the air? Why aren't we analyzing satellite photos of the landing site from the last six months looking for meteorological patterns? Why isn't someone poring over every byte of telemetry data from the instrument logs looking for some kind of an anomaly? Who's working the simulators?"

  "We have a crew in Building 9 ready to start as soon as they know what systems and procedures they should be looking at."

  "All of them!" the Director barks. "They should be looking at everything! I need answers, people. Not theories. Not speculation. And sure as hell not more questions. I have to report to the President as soon as he's done tanning, and I need something more concrete than 'it was either a mechanical failure or a dust devil.'"

  Sarek covers his face with both hands. His fingernails are a little long and yellow with nicotine. "We've been over this and over this and —"

  Someone starts laying down a distinct and surprisingly funky beat on the conference room door with a combination of knuckles, palms, and fists. The rhythm is apparently much more compelling than theories as to how Lockwood met his demise on Mars because suddenly everyone is wide-eyed and paying close attention. Prabs starts wagging his head on his long slender neck and even the Director's stiff body is not immune to the groove. It isn't until the drumming stops and the door opens that everyone realizes nobody remembered to lock it after Sarek's last bathroom break.

  "Yo. S'up, y'all?" It is Randall, an intern[18] who was brought in to do dramatic renderings and animations of things that NASA can't get footage of, but that they know must look awesome (probes descending through alien atmospheres, conceptual spacecraft giving tours of the Sun's corona, the strange and exotic creatures that probably don't live in the tails comets — that sort of thing). He's wearing a vintage Star Wars T-shirt over a long underwear top, wraparound sunglasses, and he's sporting a soul patch that works uncommonly well on him. "I'm supposed to bring this to someone in here."

  The Director has come out of her trance and is back to being annoyed. "What is it?"

  "Oh, hey, what up, Stace?" Randall says to The Digital Bitch. The two exchange what can only be described as
a gang sign.

  "What up, homeboy?"

  "Nada. You know. Just chillin' and whatnot. You?"

  "Just solving the mysteries of the universe and shit. You know."

  "Cool." Social protocols properly observed, Randall turns his attention back to the Director's question. "Anyway, it's like some kind of a tape or something from like the Chinese embassy or whatever."

  Sarek jumps to his feet and snatches the envelope from the kid. "Thank you very much. Goodbye."

  "Dude, chill," Randall admonishes as he withdraws. "Peace out, y'all."

  Sarek tears the top off the envelope and removes an enormous cassette tape, then offers it to The Digital Bitch. "Here, put this in."

  "Why do I always have to be the AV guy?"

  "For Christ's sake, Stacey. Can't you just do this one thing without complaining? We might be about to find out what happened to someone who I believe happens to be a very good friend of yours."

  "Not that good," the Digital Bitch says, snatching the cassette from Sarek's hand. "I hate that fucking machine, but I'll do it for Lockwood."

  The TV and VCR are on a multi-tiered metal cart in the front of the room. The Digital Bitch turns on both devices and feeds the cassette to the component on the bottom shelf. It is accepted with a great deal of mechanical whirring and clicking.

  "Make sure it's on channel three," Noone says.

  "No shit, Einstein."

  "That is the wrong clicker," Prabs says. "It is the other one."

  "This is pathetic," The Digital Bitch says as she leans around the cart to check the cabling. "My great-grandmother probably wouldn't even recognize this crap."

  "We use it until it breaks," the Director says. "Now get out of the way."

  When the tube warms up, they see the green and white flag of the People's Democratic Republic of China. There are bands of white static at the top and bottom of the picture.