New Decameron Sixty: Laura J. Mixon (Patreon)

Child Left Behind, Chapter 1

by Laura J. Mixon

1. I Get The Letter

When the Air Force officials knocked, I knew why they had come. They stood on the stoop: uniformed, grave, official-looking, hats at sternums. Just as I’d always imagined. I opened the door. 

“Hannah Song?” the captain asked.

I replied, “My parents are dead.” 

He shared a glance with the other two. “Yes, ma’am. There was an accident.” He pulled an envelope from inside his coat and handed it to me. “We’re sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks,” I replied, taking the envelope. 

The chaplain asked, “May we come in?”

“Sorry! This isn’t a great time. But it truly isn’t necessary. I’m fine.” 

She said, “Still, we’re glad to take some time and talk to you about it. It must be a shock.” 

“Honestly, I’m fine, Reverend. I’m sorry it’s happened but—“ I shrugged. “It’s been so long I barely remember them.” I placed my hand on the door jamb. “I made my peace with all that”—I waved my hand vaguely—“a long time ago.” I didn’t bother laying out precisely what ‘all that’ was. I began inching back, and said through the shrinking crack in the door, “So-o-o... supper’s on the stove. Gotta dash! Thanks for dropping by.”

# 

After they left, I took a moment to tear open the envelope and read the letter. Accident at the power plant…explosive decompression in the lava tubes…they hadn’t suffered (like they knew). My parents were patriots, heroes; their sacrifice hadn’t been in vain. Yada-yada. Signed by the president glossy indigo ink. I rubbed my thumb across the signature, then brought the paper up under my nose and sniffed. 

Yep, definitely used a fountain-pen….

A pot rattled in the kitchen. Shit! I hurried in, tossing the letter onto the table. Luckily, it only was the noodle water making the lid dance, and not the soup broth. I lifted the soup lid and the steamy aromas made my mouth water—garlic, ginger, lemongrass, chili. I dropped the noodles into the noodle pot and swept the minced chicken into the soup broth, along with the green onions and bok choy. Then I went back and picked up the letter, and read it again. 

My eyes kept sliding off the words. Finally I gave up trying. I pulled out a chair and sat down with the letter in my hand.

Who’re you kidding? Stop pretending this hasn’t affected you.

Not everything I’d told the officials had been a lie. It had been a long time since I’d seen my parents. Two-thirds of my life. 

I had been slated to go. Did you know? I still have my paraphernalia, of course. There’s my NASA patch, as well as the ESA, Air Force, Navy dateline- and equator-crossing patches. I have a small ceremonial kapa given to me by a mission crewmember’s mom. And those are way cool. I’m not shedding tears over any Girl Scout badge I might have gotten, if I’d had a more ”normal“ early childhood.

And that TIME cover and interview. That was fun. It was back in the thirties, when paper magazines were still around. The snaggletoothed kid on the cover, swimming in that child-sized space suit… big beaming smile, pigtails poking out of her helmet, and holding onto the hands of her astronaut parents? Yep. That was me. I kept it all. It’s collecting dust in a box up in the attic. And of course, that TIME cover and interview. That was back in the thirties, when paper magazines were still around. 

If you were following the news feeds back then, you’d be wondering right about now how it is I came to be standing here on my very-much-a-Terran stoop on a San Francisco hillside in the Sunset District, breathing in the heavy humid air of late winter on the Bay while I got official notice that my Martian-émigré parents were dead, as opposed to finding myself lying equally dead alongside them, up there. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. All these years later, I hadn’t a clue.

There’d been rumors, back then. Someone in the chain-of-command had chickened out at the last minute, perhaps—afraid I’d be a burden to the crew. Or maybe they were concerned about bad publicity, should something happen to me. I do know I got in the way, when we were training in Antarctica, because the scientists and techs often let me know in no uncertain terms. Or there was that time I got frostbite, and lost a toe. Everyone had been upset about it—there was a huge to-do. That could have been it.

I give them this; my parents fought the decision. Even at the age of not-quite-seven, I remember all the phone calls, letters, calling in of favors. There were petitions—arguments—pleas for higher-ups to pull strings. I haven’t forgotten the sleepless nights, and all their terrible, wrenching fights, between when we got word and when they left.

My most vivid memory is from three weeks before the launch. We spent our last week before they went into pre-launch lock-down staying with my dad’s parents in a clapboard house they had rented for the five of us in Jacksonville.

Yéye and nǎinai had put my parents up in the guest bedroom. I had a cozy space in the converted attic loft. I’d put on a brave face, when nǎinai had shown me my bed, and asked me lots of questions about our trip from Houston. We all went on outings: to DisneyWorld and the Everglades and the beach. But that last night after dinner, I cracked like an egg. I threw my food at the wall—the lovely dinner my grandmother had cooked—shoved her away—“I don’t want you; I want my mom!”—and stumbled up the stairs. I found my mom in their bedroom and clung to her waist and begged her not to go without me. I kicked and yelled and screamed and broke things and punched walls, till my knuckles were bloody and my voice raw. 

Eventually I exhausted myself, and she picked me up and held me, and said over and over that everything was going to be all right. But despite her warm breath in my hair and the gentle rocking, I remember how the tension in her arms and back put the lie to those words. Then my dad carried me upstairs, tucked me into bed, and then stood there, staring at me, so hard and for so long that I was terrified. 

I lay awake until they’d all gone to bed, and when the murmurs and footsteps and house noises had faded and the only light was the moon’s soft rays on the attic floor, I took my tatty old sock monkey and slipped out of bed. I braved the dark, and tiptoed inch by terrifying inch across those creaky old boards—down the steep attic stairs, one by one—and curled up with my back against their bedroom door. 

Sometime during the dark hours I fell asleep, and woke to find them gone. Three weeks later, on Ares XV Launch Day—July 20, 2037 at 0720, to be precise; nine days after my seventh birthday—I clung to nǎinai’s hand and watched my parents ride a tower of flame into the sky.

Yéye and nǎinai were gone now, too. They were casualties of the enterovirus pandemic that hit during my junior year in high school. First nǎinai caught it from a coworker, and then yéye caught it, too. The hospitals had all been swamped that spring. So, like five percent of the city’s population, my grandparents died in each other’s arms, crammed into a single bed in a makeshift isolation unit at a field hospital. 

But everyone has their horror story, these days. 

When my soup was ready, I picked up the letter again and read it one last time. I ran my finger over the signature, and the shiny foil of the Presidential seal, pressed into the bottom. Then I tore the letter up and tossed it in the trash. 

Finally, I thought. Finally it’ll be true, when people ask why I’m not going home to visit family during the holidays and I tell them I have no family to go home to.

It was only then I realized with a shock that they hadn’t said anything about Michael, my little Martian brother: the son they had had up there.

#

I settled down on the couch with my soup bowl and chopsticks to catch the news. The newscasts were just now reporting it, picking up on social media buzz. An explosion had occurred at shortly after three p.m., Pacific Standard Time. Voice communications with the station had been lost. All members of the expedition were presumed dead. (Then why hadn’t they said anything about Michael in the letter?)

They showed a few NASA PR videos from before the explosion—the usual stuff I’d been ignoring for years. I got a recent glimpse of my dad, intermittently pixelated. He was joking with one of the other engineers as they did routine maintenance in the power plant. The feed cut off in mid-syllable, as if they’d simply lost the signal. They also showed a bit of looped footage outside the tunnels, near the station entrance, from a livecam that had been knocked over by the blast: a mouse-eye view of the nearby equipment, all of which was coated with dust. Judging by the blotches obscuring the view, the livecam was, too.

Obama Base had fifteen crewmembers—seven couples and Michael. Most of the eleven habitats had been printed in-situ: nine in a set of lava tubes in the side of a cliff; one, the entry port, at the tunnel opening; and the last, the bio lab and greenhouse, atop the bluff at the cliff’s edge. All of them were connected by retractable tubes they’d dubbed Hobbitrails. From the one camera still active, you couldn’t see much: first it showed a flash, and the view shook and wobbled till it toppled over. Then (because it fell facing the tunnel entrance) gouts of smoke billowed from the tunnel entrance. The entry airlock to the tunnels was in smoking ruins.

The feed after that was just a succession of grainy images, but through the smoke and dust, the cliff face above the entrance looked different—a partial collapse? And the Hobbitrail that zig-zagged up from it to the cliff top had been shredded so badly that you could see the tattered struts of the staircase. 

Soon more video showed up from assorted Mars-orbital satellites. NASA released the first high-resolution video of the explosion itself: a silent flash at the cave mouth blotted out the view, and a dust cloud bloomed so fast and so big the entire cliff face disappeared. When the satellite came back around a half hour later, it zoomed in on the bluff atop the base. Through the slowly settling dust clouds you could make out a weblike set of cracks in the ground that hadn’t been there before. An implosive subsidence had occurred. The lava tubes had mostly—if not completely—collapsed. The base was gone. 

I drew my legs up onto the couch, and leaned forward, cross-legged, turning the rendering this way and that in the overlay, biting my lip. The kid couldn’t have survived that. No one could. A collapse that bad? No, he had to be dead. 

Unless he’d been out in a rover, of course. (Which they’d never let him do alone.) Or in the greenhouse. (Also highly unlikely. They wouldn’t let a kid that young stay outside the caves by himself. Would they?)

But if he was dead, too, why hadn’t they mentioned him in the letter? They would have said something about him, in a letter someone high up in whatever echelon wrote these kinds of things, wrote that and signed by hand, in ink, by the President. 

A clerical error, then? Was that even possible? 

I found a Bay Area news feed that must have had a JPL connection or something, because their coverage was the best I could find anywhere on the web. They flashed photos of my parents and Michael, as well as the other team members, and gave brief bios. China’s first crewed mission to Mars—Zhū Què Sān—was nearing Mars orbit and would arrive in seven days. One newsfeed anchor reported unconfirmed rumors that China had already reached out to the US with an offer for its taikonaut team to visit the site and search for survivors. But no one who was paying attention thought there was much point. Missions to Mars, even autonomous supply runs, happened rarely. If a crewed mission was going to arrive on the heels of the disaster, why were they off by a week? For fuck’s sake.

Of course I couldn’t leave it alone. After dinner I spent hours chasing fireflies around the massive, insular, undirected graph that made up NASA’s assorted AI-enabled call trees: first, via chat-bot and then by phone. No joy. But while I was on hold at yet another node in the call chain, I realized that I already knew someone; someone who might not only have some real answers, but I felt sure would return my call.

Air Force Colonel Petran Danbren had been an astronaut himself, and an alternate for Ares XV. He and his husband, Ephesian Archange, had been close friends of my parents’. I’d fallen out of touch with them over the years, but they’d been faithfully sending me Christmas letters and birthday cards ever since the launch fourteen years before. 

After his retirement he'd gone to work for Lockheed-Martin. Which meant he still had his high-level clearance, and likely lots of connections inside the Beltway. He would know things others wouldn’t. I dug around in my overlay files till I found his contact info, and touched his icon. The number still worked! 

I gnawed a cuticle while the carrier signal chirped. We hadn’t spoken in years. After what seemed like forever, the connection opened with a click. 

“Unca Pete?” I asked. “Hello?” 

A rustling. He didn’t have video on. “Danbren.”

Well, shit. It was well past eleven his time. I could tell by his tone that I’d waked him. 

“Hi. This is Hannah. Hannah Song. I’m so sorry to bother you this late. I just—I didn’t know who else to call.”

“Oh, my God.” More rustling. Then he mumbled, “It’s Hannah.” To me he said, “No, no—it’s good. Of course you called! Glad you did. I should have called you. Sorry, shrimp. It’s been…today’s been a rough stretch of road.”

“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked. A long silence ensued. I mean, really long. Too long.

“Umm…are you still there?”

“I’m here. Sorry.” Then he said, “Tell you what—I’ll come out.”

Normally I would have argued, out of courtesy, if nothing else. There’s no need; I was just curious; it’s not such a big deal. Not this time. 

“Thanks, Unca Pete. It…” Why was my voice shaking? “It would mean a lot to me.”

“What’s your address?”

I swept it to him via my overlay, and waited while he captured and confirmed it.

“Got it,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

#

He arrived at my place at around 4:30 p.m. the next day. I heard him before I saw him: first the heavy footsteps on the stoop, then the doorbell, and his booming voice, “Anybody home? Shrimp, you there?” just before I opened the door. And there he stood: maybe not quite as gargantuan as I remembered from my childhood, but he still filled the door’s frame, a looming bundle of gristle and discipline. 

I broke into a grin, and pushed open the screen door. “Just so happens I am! You’re in luck.”

He stepped in and looked around, hands on hip bones. “This was your grandparents’ place.” 

I nodded. “I inherited it after they died.”

His gaze went to the wall and table where I’d set up a little tableau honoring them, and spent a moment looking at the photos and memorabilia. “Ephesian and I were sorry to hear about their deaths.” 

“Thanks.” He and Unca Fizz had been out of the country at the time, and unable to attend the funeral. I hadn’t thought much about it; they hadn’t been around much after my parents had left. (No one ever said anything, but I’d gotten the feeling that however close they and my parents were, that same closeness did not exist with my grandparents.)

“And you!” he said, turning back to me. “All grown up now and living on your own. How about them apples?”

“You're fit and trim, as ever,” I replied. “Not as tall as you used to be, I think…”

“Hmmm, I don’t believe I’m the one who’s changed in that regard…”

“…and quite a gleam you’ve got up top now, too!” I gestured at his bald head. “You used to have some hair. And the goatee?” It was several shades grayer than it used to be. “They have a cure for both those, you know.”

He rubbed his smooth crown; his cheeks turned a bit pink. “Ehhh. Lot of fuss and bother.”

“Well, I was just teasing. You look distinguished. And I bet Unca Fizzy likes it just fine,” I wiggled my eyebrows. 

“Now, now.” He may have smiled. “I’m a lucky man.”

As he said that, I noticed my nosy duplex neighbor walking past the screen door out on the stoop, wa-a-ay more slowly than necessary. Unca Pete and I exchanged a glance. “How about you let me treat you to dinner?” he said.

”Twist my pinky!” I shut down my overlay and furled my AR leads into my collar and wristband. “I know just the place.“ 

I took him to the Social Kitchen and Brewery, just down the street. While Unca Pete got us a table, I headed over to the bar and ordered our beverages. I’d barely sat down when the waiter came by and placed a mug of ale in front of him, and another foaming mug in front of me. Unca Pete ordered onion rings and a cheeseburger. I chose half a Portobello Reuben with coleslaw. Then he gestured at my mug. “Christ, I’m getting old. Thought you’d just turned twenty.”

“No—you remembered right. Twenty-one next summer.” I raised my own mug. “Ginger beer. Non-alcoholic. Cheers.” I tapped my mug against his.

“Cheers.” He quaffed his ale. 

I gestured with my chin at the bag next on the bench. “Is that your overnight bag? You’re more than welcome to sleep in the guest bedroom. So sorry—I should have offered sooner! I mean, it’s still got a bunch of my kid stuff in it, and some school clutter, but it’s perfectly comfortable…”

“No need; thanks. I’m already checked in at the Hyatt. But, while we’re on the subject…” He dug his hands into the bag and pulled out a wrapped present. With both hands and a grunt, he lifted it out, and set it on the battered wood table with a thump. “Happy birthday, Hannah Song.”  

I eyed the package and smiled. Whatever was in there had been swathed in a mess of expensive foil paper, with a clumsy attempt at a cloth ribbon binding. “You shouldn’t have!”

He looked sheepish. “In my defense, I was in a hurry to catch my flight.” 

I giggled. “It’s fine, Unca Pete. Thank you so much!”

I pulled it over, and got a surprise. It was heavy. And an odd shape, too—sort of like one of those giant, old-fashioned hat boxes—but with a top shaped like a basketball. In my hands it felt dense. Solid. Metallic. A dome on a circular base, maybe half-again as big as a large dinner plate.

By then I had torn off the wrapping and my breath froze in my chest. Atop a brass base, several polished stones were set in tracks under a tempered-glass dome. I touched the dome and it was cold to the touch. Still chilled, no doubt, from its journey in the cargo hold of the popjet he must have ridden here.

I knew what it was. Of course I did. I’d seen the device—or one like it—many times when I was young. The last time I’d seen it, it had been sitting on the mantle of his and Unca Fizz’s fireplace. 

It was an orrery, and had been one of my mom’s most treasured possessions, left to her by her mother. My parents had given it to Unca Pete for safekeeping when they’d left. I’d forgotten about it—Mother had been Babcia Anka’s only child; she’d never met her father—and Babcia had died when I was tiny. But looking at the orrery now, I was stunned I could have ever forgotten such a magnificent device.

Atop the brass base was a pewter plate with six circular concentric rings carved into its surface: Gliese 581’s planetary orbits. those grooves each had a shallow depression, which held a sphere of semi-precious stone. Babcia Anka had chosen different gemstones to represent each planet and moon. The distances were not at all to scale, but the sizes—if my memory could be trusted (it must have been something someone must have told me when I was young)—were logarithmically scaled.

In the center of the metal plate sat a ball of rosy topaz about the size of a grapefruit. Moving out from the center: first came an obsidian marble; next, an aquamarine the size of my fist. In third place came a tennis-ball-sized lapis sphere, indigo-blue with striations of gold and white, followed by a golf-ball-sized blue amethyst in fourth place and a tennis-ball-sized garnet in fifth. In the sixth orbit was another marble; this one an emerald. They all rested in shallow depressions along the grooves that represented their orbits around the rose-topaz star.

Two of the stones—the aquamarine and the garnet—also sat at the center of their own smaller concentric rings. And each of those rings had also depressions containing tiny polished spheres. In the seventh, outermost, ring were tiny chunks of quartz, scattered along it like a bead necklace.

He started to show me where the key was but I batted his hand away with a smile. “I remember!”

I ran my fingers along the base till my fingers found what they sought. It was a turnkey. It looked like one of those old-fashioned wind-up keys. Attached to its stem was a small envelope on a zip-tie. Beside it was a combination-lock cylinder with eight numeric tumblers. 

I flipped the switch clockwise. The motor inside the base hummed and the tumblers clicked: 21012051. Today’s date, in ddmmyyyy format. Nothing happened for a good five seconds, but even as I opened my mouth to ask if it was broken, the glass dome slid open in five segments, like a wild rose, and receded into the base. Meanwhile, rings of light shone from the grooves carved into the plate, causing the stones to gleam and flash as they rose off their resting spots. Each gemstone spiraled up along its own orbit up to a position about 15 centimeters above the plate: each in a different position along its orbit.

Then the spheres began to move. They spun and twirled in a complex orbital dance: a gas giant and two super-Earths, each with their own moons, and two small and barren rocky worlds. From the base issued Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, played with bells, reminiscent of a music box’s sound. 

“It was made in 2024,” he said.

“By Babcia Anka,” I finished, “to commemorate her exoplanetary discoveries. Yes! I remember now.” 

I’d been three when Babcia had died. She’d immigrated to the US from Poland during the twenties. As a child she’d had cancer, back in the 1960s when treatments were brutal and few. Her leukemia had gone into remission, but afterward her health had never been good, and she’d died young. My mom had had lots of stories about her, though, with all her adventures, misadventures, and discoveries. A mathematician and astrophysicist, she had created a set of algorithms that could predict with a much greater degree of precision than before—not just the number, size, and orbital positions of worlds in other solar systems—but under optimal conditions even the presence of moons, too. The algorithm was named the Kubiak Method. 

“I remember playing with it one time when we visited you in D.C.,” I said, running my fingers over the cool glass dome. “I couldn’t leave it alone.” I must have been five, because it had been the spring before we’d gone to Antarctica, and we’d been there for a full year. “Mom was afraid I would break it.” I looked up at him. “Or…is this a replica?”

He shook his head. “It’s the original. Your mom wanted me to give it to you on your twenty-first birthday, or.” He broke off. “When she passed.”

‘Passed.’ I’d always hated that expression. “She died, Unca Pete. Just say she died.” He gave me an unhappy look but said nothing, because a handful of people had gathered to gaze at the orrery, whisper to each other, and take selfies. It pissed me off.

“Do you mind?” I said, standing to block their view, and they drifted away, after shooting me irritable looks. I sat again, and turned the orrery off. The bells’ tune ceased and the orbs spiraled back into their depressions.

I thought it over. Nope! Ain’t happening. I shoved the orrery back toward Unca Pete. “I—I can’t take this. Thanks, but—I don’t want it.”

Unca Pete’s eyes gleamed. He blew his nose in a big, monogrammed handkerchief. “Nonsense. It’s yours. It’s a family heirloom. Always meant for you to have it.”

“There’s no room at my place. Seriously.” Which was obviously bullshit but I didn’t care. I felt my anger growing by the moment. I drew a breath, trying to calm down. What the fuck is the matter with me?

“I can’t. It must be worth a fortune, and your Mom left it to you. I…I don’t really have a safe place to keep it. And I’ll be moving to Baltimore next fall, and…” My voice tapered off. He was looking at me intensely.

“All right, then. Fair enough. But—just hang onto it for a while. All right? I don’t want to have to schlep it all the way back to D.C. I’ll take it back from you this fall, if you still feel the same way then.”

“I’m not going to change my mind, Unca Pete. I’m sorry if this seems rude. It’s just—” I paused. “It’s too soon. I don’t want to think about it—them. Her. Not yet.” My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might explode.

“All right, shrimp. I get it. I’ll keep it safe,” he said, and pulled it back to his side of the table. He stuffed it back into the bag, wadded up the wrapping and stuffed it in, too, and zipped the bag closed. “It’s still yours, though. Always will be. Whenever you’re ready. You just let me know. I know she’d want you to have it.”

I felt the corners of my mouth tugging down and took a slug of ginger beer to wash down the lump in my throat. The waiter brought us our food, and we ate in silence. Afterward, he stepped over to the cashier and paid the bill. 

Once he’d sat back down, I leaned my chin on my elbow and spoke softly. “Unca Pete, Is it certain they’re all dead? I got the letter, but no one said anything about…you know. The kid.” He gazed at me over his near-empty mug, and I tried not to flinch. “The news reports are assuming he’s dead, too, but nothing coming from official sources confirms that.”

The silence stretched between us. He was looking down, swirling the last two inches of ale in his mug, lips pressed together. Then he looked up at me, and hair on my forearms and nape stood up.

“This has to remain confidential,” he said.

“Of course.”

“You’re their child—you’re his sister—you have a right to know.” His gaze had unfocused, and his voice sounded uncertain, like he was still trying to talk himself into whatever it was he wanted to tell me. 

“Unca Pete. You didn’t fly three thousand miles just to give me a birthday present.”

He nodded, then looked around. The place was getting crowded and noisy. “A bit more privacy is called for.” He downed the last of his ale, picked up his bag, and stood. “Come on. I’ll fill you in back at the hotel.” 

#

We rode a glass elevator up the outside of his hotel, all the way up to the floor beneath the penthouse. It was at least fifty stories up. There were only eight suites up there. He opened the door to his and I stepped inside. I whistled.

“Wow…overdoing it, much?”

He set down his luggage; their limbs opened out and they scuttled off into the bedroom, where I could hear them knocking about, emptying themselves out and putting their cargo away. “Frequent flyer miles! They’re a thing.”

“Uhh…your slip is showing, Unca Pete.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I haven’t taken a flight since I was six.” He looked at me, startled.

“Yes, really,” I said. “Like, say, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of humans on the planet who can’t afford the flight, much less the offsets.” A phrase popped into my head from his youth—hackneyed nowadays, but apropos. “Percenter privilege, much?”

I knew I could get away with ribbing him about it, because he’d used it once himself, in a letter to my dad, back in the early twenties. I’d come across it while packing things up after my grandparents’ death. Pete and my dad had been roommates at college, and Unca Pete had been worried about his ability as a cisgender man from a socially conservative, upper-middle-class New England family, to be a good husband to this brilliant trans Afro-Caribbean cellist he’d fallen in love with. 

He chuckled and clutched his chest. “Ouch. Touché!”

He dropped his bag, the one with the orrery in it, next to an easy chair and went over to the kitchenette. While he was fiddling with the dispenser controls, I wandered around. The place was big—maybe four times the size of my own living room. The light-blanketed hills of San Francisco shone through the picture window. Beyond them, the Golden Gate Bridge floated on a blanket of glowing orange fog. A bedroom nearly as large lay beyond the open door, complete with a massive bed and another picture window.

“Too bad Unca Fizz’s not here to enjoy this with you.”

“Oh, yes! He’d love it.” He’d managed to sync the room with his cell, and thumbed through it now. “What would you like to drink? Would you like a snack? The bar’s fully stocked.”

“Just a Diet Pepsi, thanks.”

“Hey, Room!” Unca Pete said. A beep in response. “Double whisky, on the rocks, and a Diet Pepsi in the can, please.”

A clinking and a clatter, and then drinks emerged from the fridge on a tray. Unca Pete tossed me the diet soda. We moved over to the seating area near the windows. He dropped into the easy chair, and I slipped off my shoes and tucked my feet under me on the couch. I leaned forward. Let’s do this.

“OK,” I said. “Spill. What’s going on?”

In answer he downed his drink, set it on the side table with a thump, and looked directly at me. Dread was rolling off him in waves like a cold fog, and my heart started banging hard against my ribs. 

There was a question I hadn’t asked myself. Why hadn’t he called me right after the accident? Why had it been some nameless Air Force dude who had told me about my parents’ deaths, instead of him? Unca Pete had been one of my parents’ closest friends, and I knew he’d kept in touch with them. He had a Top-Secret clearance and worked in the space milops sector; he’d almost certainly have been one of the first to know what had happened, in much deeper detail than most. 

And now that I’d allowed myself to wonder, that question and its answer rose together in my thoughts. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to give me details about my parents’ deaths. It was this. He hadn’t wanted to tell me this.

“The best way,” he said after a long pause, “is to show you.” He pulled his cell and fiddled with it. 

I snatched up my Diet Pepsi as the glass surface of the table between us swung up to the vertical. In a moment, virtual snow appeared in its midst, and began to resolve into… something else.

It took a moment for me to understand what I was seeing. For a moment it looked like the inside of a bio lab, but then came a BANG! And a BA-PHOOOMMF! The viewer jerked and fell over as a dark, reddish haze or fog filled the screen. I realized objects were flying or falling through the clouds of smoke and dust. 

My skin crawled. Unca Pete was showing me the feed from the disaster.

Bang-crash! Glass, metal, something—somethings—struck hard surfaces. A deep rumbling beneath it all was fading away, till I could hear, faintly, the kind of screams you never want to have to hear in your life. 

Then the viewer wiggled around and righted itself. My little brother’s face appeared—a dirty face, whites showing around his irises, his chin quivering. 

He’d grown a lot since I’d seen him last. He’d be about twelve, I thought. Michael’s skin-tone was cooler and a tad darker than mine—and he had Mom’s hazel eyes and her full wide mouth, while I had Dad’s dark brown eyes and his square face. From Mom he got the wavy auburn hair—though a darker shade, and from Dad a broad nose and high cheekbones. I had Mom’s narrower nose, and my hair was straight and black, like Dad’s. I had her pointed elfin chin and Dad’s short stature and solid bones; he had Dad’s round face and Mom’s taller, lanky frame.

It was as if someone had taken all Mom’s and Dad’s parts, thrown them in a jar and shaken them up, and then divvied them up between the kid and me. Michael was my inverse, you could say. My opposite. The anti-Hannah.

“Hello?” His voice made me nearly jump out of my seat. I could tell how his gaze and balance shifted that he was messing with some controls. He coughed, and put his sleeve over his nose.

“Mom? You there? What just happened?” Then a long pause. Clicking, as if he were pushing buttons on a comm device out-of-view. “Dad, this is Mike; come in. Come in, Dad. This is Mike.” Another pause; a deep breath. “Colonel Manikov?” Pause. “Anyone?”

He moved off-camera, and I heard scuffling, breathing, and other noises. Unca Pete forwarded through several minutes of this. I couldn’t make out much, because of all the smoke and dust. 

“Nothing more happens till four minutes in. Here.” He slowed the video stream to normal, and pointed. “That’s the elbow of his spacesuit, in the right quadrant. Now the edge of his helmet. He’s suiting up to go out.” Unca Pete worked his controls, and the images jerked and stuttered. “This is from three hours later.”

Michael was back at the console, his tousled little boy head sticking out of the suit’s neck ring. His face was ashen and his voice quavered. “Houston, do you read? Mom and Dad are dead. “I think, I think… they’re all dead.

“I’m on emergency power and air now. I got the spare generator going. Life Sciences is the only Quonset left, I think, and it’s damaged. I patched it the best I could, but it’s got a slow leak I can’t find, up high. What do I do?”

I found myself halfway across the room on my feet. I had nearly bolted out before I even knew what I was doing. Now I paced, back and forth, biting my thumbnail. But I couldn’t force my gaze away from the image on the screen.

Unca Pete fast-forwarded again. Mostly the kid just sat there, waiting for a response from Earth. At some point he had a rabbit in his lap, who he clutched and petted in fast-forward motion. Tears streaked through the dirt on his face and his lips quivered. 

When Unca Pete slowed the stream again the rabbit was gone. Close to four hours must have passed, for him, by this point. Shit—what must that have been like?

Michael just stripped off the top of his suit and long johns, and was struggling with a big syringe and a bottle of some brown, syrupy liquid. He’d come out in gooseflesh and was shaking so hard now that he could barely control his hands. 

Houston was just now getting back to him. They apologized for the delay; the blast had taken comms down and they’d had to figure out a hack. He should sit tight; the engineers were working the problem and would have some answers for him soon.

That had to be a lie. What could they possibly do to help? 

“What’s he doing now?” I asked. “Giving himself a shot?” 

Michael had managed to get the shaking under control enough to inject a syringe into a vein in the crook of his elbow. I could tell that he had done this sort of thing before, and wondered where he’d gotten the practice. He whimpered as he stuck the needle in, but pushed the plunger in anyway.

Unca Pete gave me a look that terrified me, but didn’t speak. He let Michael say it. 

The boy stumbled over to the console afterward. He shrugged his overalls back on and pressed the seams shut. Then he picked up the rabbit again. “Houston, there isn’t enough air and power to last till I can be rescued. I’ve been thinking it over and this is the only thing that might work. I’ve just given myself an injection of the stuff Mom gave to the rabbit that lived. Maybe I will still be alive when you get here.” His voice broke. “Please hurry.”

The transmission ended. Unca Pete wasn’t looking at me anymore. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“You’re his last remaining relative,” Unca Pete said finally. “I thought you should know.”

The transmission would have been from yesterday afternoon.

“Is he still alive?”

Unca Pete exhaled. “For the moment. He shut down communications last night to conserve power, but we know he made it through the night, because his biotelemetry implant says he’s still alive. Mission Control has since used the ROVs to find and plug that last leak in there, so conditions aren’t worsening any further. But they’re bad enough as it is.”

“Jesus.” I ran fingers through my hair. “How much power does he have? Can he last a week?”

“Well…there are solar collectors outside the cave, and temperatures in the remaining habitat won’t drop to ambient while they’re still supplying power to the one generator that survived the blast. But ambient is minus sixty-two C, and the Quonset he’s in got down to minus twenty before he got the generator back on. Houston told him to use the power for oxygen generation, so he can’t spare the power to warm the room back up. And they’re projecting that oxygen partial pressure will gradually drop to one hundred thirty-five millibars in the next few days—not survivable. Which will but carbon dioxide partial pressure up near ten millibars—also toxic levels. And if all that doesn’t kill him, a big dust storm is scheduled to hit Arsia Mons tomorrow. Once it hits, no sunlight.”

“Which means no recharging the generator.”

“Right. At that rate the humidifiers and heaters will only last two to three days, at best, before they run out of power. Which will desiccate his lungs.”

“But what about that drug he took?”

Unca Pete shrugged. “It might help. If it works. But even if he actually got enough of it—and that’s a big if; he’s no medic—there’s an equally good chance he got too much, and that the drug itself will kill him.” He leaned forward on his knees, and gave me a look that terrified me. “But if. If! He got the drug injected properly—if the drug by some miracle does what it was designed to do—and if he didn’t get too much or too little of it—he might make it till the Chinese expedition arrives.”

“What was it? What did he inject himself with?”

He pressed his lips together. “I’m afraid that part is classified. I don’t even have that level of clearance. All I’ve been told is, it may help him survive in near-Martian-ambient conditions till help gets there, if he’s very, very lucky. 

“But if he does, it hands us another big problem.”

I had stalled in place, but now I started pacing again. I wanted to run away from this conversation so badly I could hardly stand it. What has this got to do with me? I thought. Seriously; what could I possibly do for him? 

“What do you mean, a big problem?”

“The Chinese expedition reaches Mars orbit in six days. If they decide to do this, they could arrive at Obama Station under a week. The mission engineers have programmed our ROVs to destroy all sensitive materials, so as not to violate national security. But now that he’s injected himself, Michael himself has become a living experiment. One that we would not want to fall into Chinese hands.”

That was one thing too many. Yéye used to say a raging hellhound slept in my belly. I felt it stir now. I had an urge to attack Unca Pete—to launch myself at him—rip chunks of flesh from his face, to scream. To smash the picture window.

He saw my anger and raised his hands. “Easy, Hannah! It’s not me saying this. It’s our government. I’m breaking the law, telling you all this.” He stood, and took me by the arms. “I want to help him, if he lives. If I can.”

I shoved his arms away and staggered back.

“You don’t get it.” The words tore their way free of me. “I don’t care about him!” I gestured savagely at the frozen image of my brother. “He’s nothing to me! Why did you burden me with this? I hope he dies!”

I bolted from the suite and slammed the door. And stood there for five minutes in the hall, back to the door, both hands clutching my mouth, as if they could keep the words in that I’d already spoken. I wished desperately I had the courage to knock on the door and take it all back. Or that he would know I was there, and open the door to me again. 

And I wanted to weep. For my dead parents, who had left me behind so long ago, out of fear I would end up where my little brother was right now—oh yes; I knew the truth, however much I hated them for it. And for my little brother and what was happening to him right now. But most of all, I wanted to weep because despite everything, I envied Michael. I wanted to mourn those twelve years he’d had with my parents that I hadn’t—years with them that should have been mine. 

Oh, how I wanted mourn! To scream and tear my clothes, as I had when when yéye and nǎinai died! How I wanted to let Unca Pete—the only person in the world, now, who knew me and the whole truth of my history—comfort me. But I couldn’t. Instead, I walked down the hall to the elevator, dry-eyed and ashamed.

******************************************************

"Delicate lovely home made Asian soup, burgers, onion rings, and a Portobello Reuben," he says, sighing happily. "Some people really know how to write food."

"That was such a good story," she says. "They went to Mars, and they didn't take her. And the story's about her, not about her brother. But I hope he's OK with whatever he injected himself with. You didn't get that, did you?"

"It sounded a bit too dangerous," he says. "Eat."

She sips the soup. "This is so good.  Wow. Also, I really want to read the rest of that book and find out what happens! I think I've read everything else of Laura Mixon's."

He is eating onion rings. "She should be better known. I don't understand sometimes how people can be so good and they don't get to be superstars. She should be."

Maya nods, her mouth full.

When they have finished their supper and are licking their fingers, Maya starts, guiltily. "We said we were going to save some food!"

"We saved some fruit, remember? It's upstairs. Pomegranates and figs, in case there's nothing better for breakfast. Now, let's wash our hands and settle down to sleep. It's getting late."

They do as he suggested. There is no sign of the cat until it's just beginning to get light, when he comes back in through the window, yowling. Maya wakes, startled from a dream of a perfect orrery of another solar system. The cat dashes past her, and she lies for a moment, heart thumping.

"Are you awake," she asks, quietly.

"How could anyone sleep through that?" he asks, rherotically, his voice at a normal volume.

"There's still a world out there," Maya says, "Something was chasing him."

'It can't get in here, whatever it was. Do you want to sleep some more, or wake up and read?"

Maya lies there for a moment, considering. "Read," she says, at last.

They get up and wash, and Maya drinks water. "Coffee," he mutters hopefully, looking at the pile of books.

"Vaccines," Maya reminds him.

"Yes. And I think you have a bit more growing up to do." He picks up a book. "How about this? Mike Allen, Blue Evolution."

"All right," she says, then hesitates. "Isn't Mike Allen the guy who wrote that really amazing poem about smuggling hope past the All Hope Abandon checkpoint into Hell?"

"That's the one," he says. "His things can be kind of dark. But he's really good."

"First thing in the morning?" Maya mutters under her breath, but takes the book, and they read.