Prosperity Calling

“There’s… there’s something in the stars.”

“Copy that, Prosperity 3. Care to elaborate?” Sarah Higgins leaned back in the command chair at Mission Control and looked around at her night shift colleagues, busy at their computers, plotting trajectory scenarios or playing MMORPGs, or both. She was tempted herself. It would take seven and a half minutes for her query to reach the crew and as long for a response. Plenty of time to log-on and get in a couple of quick turns. She checked the countdown clock and opened another window…

“Something just—” The transmission broke off. Silence rather than static. Too soon for it to be a response.

“I didn’t get that. Please repeat, Prosperity.”

Something. A mumble or hum followed by several thumps. She turned up the gain. The carrier wave whispered in her ear. She checked the monitor but the ship was broadcasting in audio only, standard practice for routine communications.

“Major Chatterjee? Is everything alright.”

Chatterjee was on loan from the Indian program, part of the new international Mars team. She was a veteran—this was her fourth mission; she’s been to the moon for God’s sake—and knew the protocols. If there was a problem, she should be vocalizing it, providing as many details as possible to augment the automatic data transmissions sent by the ship’s computers.

“Dave? Are you getting anything odd from syscomp?”

“Am I looking for anything in particular?” The burly engineer was scanning several screens, light flickering across his bearded face as data scrolled in real-time from a dozen monitoring programs. “All systems nom—Wait. What the hell?”

“What is it?” Dave was staring at the left-hand screen, the one that should be quiescent. “Talk to me, Dave.”

“We just had an eleven second burn. And, now, another one. She… she’s bringing her down.”

Prosperity 3 wasn’t supposed to land. Twelve turns around the red planet and lunar base again for Chatterjee and her three crewmates. What the hell was going on?

“Copy that.” Higgins kept the tremor out of her voice, even though her heart was pounding so hard she was sure Dave could hear it across the room. Breathe, Sarah, you’ve spent your whole life preparing for this moment. “Prosperity 3, we’re reading an engine burn. Please advise your situation.”

“They’ll be on final approach before they can reply. If they can reply.” Half the night shift had gathered around Dave’s consoles; the other half were cloning the data feeds and frantically working the calculations. Triple check everything was the first thing she told them at the start of every shift.

“I’ll notify the mission chief.” She picked up the black phone that was a direct line to John Garner’s cell. Don’t answer…

“What’s the problem, Higgins?” His voice was sharp despite the early hour.

“Prosperity 3 is landing.”

“What?”

“Prosperity 3 is—”

“I heard you the first time. Did Chatterjee tell you why?”

Higgins glanced at the clock. Prosperity would have received her first message and a reply was now a minute overdue. “We’ve had no response to our queries. However, all systems are showing nominal, so it isn’t an engineering issue.”

“Keep monitoring and get someone to call in the day team. This is above your pay grade. I’ll be there in… thirty minutes. Twenty-five if I get all the lights.”

Higgins throat tightened. This is my pay grade. There was nothing the day shift could do that her own team couldn’t except maybe add to the confusion. Her crew was younger, less experienced, but as well educated and trained, as well prepared, as anyone in mission control. More importantly, they were flexible, open to thinking beyond the protocols, willing to take anyone’s suggestion, even if they weren’t part of the club. And every one of them wanted it as much as she did; no one volunteered for night shift. Not that it mattered: if Chatterjee had decided a landing was required—and refused to tell them why—there wasn’t much anyone, even Garner, could do to overrule her. Or, was there?

“Dave, can we supersede capsule command?”

“Yes and no.” The engineer didn’t look up from his screens. “There are emergency overrides but they’re designed to be used only if the crew is incapacitated. They have cancel codes if they’re not. The time delay makes it pretty difficult to control the ship in real time. It’s like trying to see eight minutes into the future, a future that changes every time Chatterjee touches the thruster.”

Garner would be here soon; she wanted something to show him that her team could handle this, that she could handle this. “If only we could see what was going on,” she muttered.

“That we can help you with,” said Misha Radwanska from the comms desk. “I can remotely turn on the cameras, both internal and external. And, unless they are actively monitoring the channels, they shouldn’t notice.”

“Do it. And then start the calls to day team.”

Misha frowned at that but began typing commands into his keyboard.

It would take an hour to get the majority of the day shift in from the ‘burbs and up to speed. That was how long they had to solve the problem. To present a solution that even Derwin Yang couldn’t refute, though she knew he would try. Her hands tightened on the arms of her chair and she forced her self to relax. Confidence is contagious.

Until video came on in a little more than fifteen minutes, there was nothing she could do but sit and stew and try not to interfere with the work going on around her.

She walked along the bank of work stations, checking in on the dozen or so technicians, their faces intense and focused on the work at hand, bodies hunched over screens and keyboards. No chatter now, but terse exchanges, seeking or supplying information from their colleagues. She stopped to listen to some of the conversations without getting in the way, offering only the briefest of encouragements. Management by walking around, Garner called it, keeping contact but trusting her people to know their job and do it, intervening only if they went astray. If anyone can save this mission, it’s them.

By the time she finished the circuit, stopping to refill her mug with bitter coffee, Misha had the video feeds running.

Chatterjee was in the command chair, her expression… not blank but strangely abstracted as if she were looking at something that wasn’t really there. Higgins had a sudden image of the way her cat sometimes stared into space as if tracking distant prey. Behind her, the rest of the crew were strapped in their chairs for landing but slumped over as if asleep or unconscious. That was crazy—who could sleep through a landing on Mars?

She flicked to the external cameras. The surface was still sufficiently distant that she could see the curve of the planet but she knew it was coming up fast and was already seven and a half minutes closer. They would be down in less than ten minutes, assuming Chatterjee was planning on a landing and not staging a billion-dollar suicide. From the look on the commander’s face, either was a possibility. Had she broken under the strain of the three-month mission? The crew had taken every psychological test known to ensure their stability and compatibility, but tests had failed before. Did Chatterjee drug the crew or is something else at play?

“Misha, do we have any external footage from—” she glanced at the clock trying to estimate when Chatterjee’s first broadcast would have been initiated. “—say, thirty minutes ago?”

Misha’s hands flew over the console but he was already shaking his head. Of course, the cameras, and every other external sensor, would be on but they would all be pointed at the surface. The primary goal of the mission was to test the feasibility of long-term missions in space as well as the components that would be used in the next mission, the one that would actually land on the red planet. Still, it was also an opportunity to increase their already substantial knowledge about the planet’s surface and its thin but turbulent atmosphere.

Misha would know there were no images of the stars. But he was wrong.

“I have about five seconds,” he said. “It’s blurry and real jumpy like someone was trying to operate the manipulator manually. It ties into the first words Chatterjee sent us.”

Someone was following protocols then, even if they had stopped seconds later. “Show the whole team. Suggestions?”

The image was jumpy, though she wasn’t sure it was blurry. The stars themselves were sharp points and down in the corner of the frame, a tiny wedge of the planet’s surface was crystal clear. But the image in the centre of the frame was a hazy blob of light, juking in a random pattern. The jerkiness was from trying to follow it as it shifted, first growing smaller, then suddenly expanding to fill the screen right before it went black.

“What the hell was that?” Davies said.

“Just give me options,” said Higgins. There had to be an answer—there had to be. And she had to find it, not for her sake, but for theirs. “Whatever comes into your mind? No wrong answers.”

“Space junk?

“A comet?”

“A static charge?”

The comments were spontaneous; first thoughts often led to deeper analysis. “Keep them coming.”

“Planetary off-gassing?”

“First contact?”

“Water vapour?”

“The Russians?”

None of it made any sense. The Russians were the most likely explanation—they resented being left out of the international effort but they hardly had the capacity to launch an alternative mission—and not even the wackiest conspiracy theories granted them mind-control technology.

Comets didn’t move like that—or even look like that—and any of the other options would have shown up in the data flows as equipment failure or damage. And still didn’t explain Chatterjee’s behavior or the crews’ apparent torpor.

Psychological breakdown and drugs had to be the answer but how did they deal with either from eighty-five million miles away, especially when the captain refused to speak.

“They’re on final approach,” said Davies. “Burning a lot of fuel. Too much, really.”

Higgins was watching the monitor for any change in Chatterjee’s expression. Her eyes were fixed and staring, probably concentrating on the data readings as she guided the ship’s approach. As near as they could tell from the minutes-old data she was going in manually rather than relying on the automated guidance system. Higgins could almost feel the controls under her own hands; even dashed dreams never went away.

“Which of the prepared staging areas are they going to?” Previous robotic missions had constructed three small bases with a living dome, fuel depots and maintenance shops. Chatterjee must be planning on using one of them to refuel for the trip home.

“None of them,” said Davies. “The trajectory isn’t feasible.”

“Where then?”

“Somewhere in the Endeavour crater.”

“That makes no sense.”

“None of this makes sense,” said Misha. “And it’s going to make less sense soon. Once they hit the atmosphere, the externals are going to tuck themselves away to avoid damage. Data flows will drop to minimum until they’re safely on the ground.”

Assuming they ever would be. Endeavour had been well mapped nearly thirty years ago; some spots might be suitable for landing but there were plenty of others—near the crater walls especially—where a soft landing would be virtually impossible.

“And there it goes.”

The face of the Captain froze and flickered and faded from view. At the last second, it looked like she was smiling. Like she knew they had been watching her and now couldn’t anymore.

“How long before we re-establish contact?”

“Twelve minutes at a minimum. Longer if they land in the shadow of the crater walls.”

Higgins glanced up at the clock. Twenty-five minutes had passed since she had talked to Garner. He would be here before Prosperity came back on-line. Several members of the day crew had wandered into the room, checking data at unmanned stations, ready to step in once Yang and the majority of his team arrived.

She watched the five second clip again, slowing down to half and then quarter speed. She knew she was missing something. She slowed it down some more until the image began to pixelate. There. Moments before the light filled the screen, a brief image of a hard, triangular object, too regular to be anything but an artificial construct. Maybe the Russians were capable of launching a parallel mission. But why? And how did they overwhelm the crew and force Chatterjee to land? Unless she had been a Russian agent all along. The Russians were known for playing the long game but in Chatterjee’s case, they would have had to recruit her while she was still in school, before she joined the Indian military. Not impossible, but…

“What have you got?” John Garner had slipped into the room unannounced and was now standing behind her as she ran the video again. She pointed to the object when it splashed on the screen. He gestured for her to run it again. “Slower if you can.”

The object appeared again but the pixelated edges made it less clear rather than more.

“It doesn’t look like anything the Russians have deployed,” Higgins said. If not the Russians, who? Something niggled. Be better, she demanded, think beyond your limitations.

Garner grunted. “Nothing we’ve seen. What makes you think it’s the Russians?”

“Who else could it be? The Chinese are already part of the mission; the Brazilian space program is in disarray after…”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Garner. “Where is Prosperity now?”

“They’ve landed in Endeavor crater.” She turned to Davies. “Do we have anything more precise?”

“We won’t know for sure until comms are active but the best guess is the southwest quadrant, fairly close to the rim.”

“That’s where Opportunity died,” she said.

“Opportunity for what?” asked Misha.

Several of the older members of the crew snorted derisively. Higgins silenced them with a glare. Misha had once told her his early interests were in botany rather than engineering. Unlike her, he hadn’t spent his childhood following every detail of every mission to Mars, dreaming of going there herself before a heart murmur ended all that. Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity… She remembered crying when she read the tweet of Opportunity’s last transmission: My battery is low and it’s getting dark.

Is that what the Russians are after – a long-dead Martian rover?

Most of the day crew had arrived though their chief was still missing. Until Yang showed up, she was still in charge, though Garner could replace her if he chose. But he was true to his own advice, standing behind her, observing but not intervening. Her crew remained focused, working hard until relieved. Misha, his face still reddened from his gaffe, looked up from his monitor. “Data flows resuming. Should have video in fifteen seconds.”

They had a working theory: somehow the Russians had overwhelmed the crew with as yet unknown technology or had subverted a decorated Indian officer to drug her colleagues and take command of module, guiding it to an unplanned and unsupported site. Unknown technology?

That sounded like nonsense even as she formulated it, but what other explanation could there be? What had one of her crew shouted out?

Maybe… Opportunity had been an effort to explore, to reach out to other worlds. What if… Yang would stick to protocol; he would screw it up.

“We have Major Chatterjee back.”

Chatterjee was staring straight into the camera, her face composed and neutral. Behind her, the three others remained motionless in their seats, though their eyes were open, expressions ranging from fear to wonder.

First contact.

“We have heard your plea and we have responded,” the woman who was no longer Chatterjee said. “There is no need to fear the dark any longer. We have come to bring you into the light.”

Every leap forward is a leap into the dark. They did the minimum so we could trust them. So I could trust them.

The philosophers and politicians could argue the symbolism of location and the choice of spokesperson for decades. The scientists would study the data now flowing from the lander for just as long. But she had a job to do. Now. Derwin Yang, hair uncombed and tie askew, entered the control room.

Higgins leaned into her microphone. “Copy that, Prosperity. The people of Earth look forward to meeting you.”