Exiles

1

The beeping won't stop.

The beeping is sound become pain.

The beeping is the pulse of eternity.

The beeping is what I deserve.

The beeping is waking me from the longest sleep of my life.

2

You look like a greasy sheet of used parchment paper."

This is Kang, crouched next to my pod as I pull myself up and spill my legs over the side.

"A weirdly specific image," I say. "But I'll take it, considering I went into this thing four months ago."

"How about me?"

"You mean how do you look?"

"Yeah."

"I'll tell you anything you want to hear if you turn off that noise."

"What?" He cocks his head like a dog listening for the distant call of his name. "You mean this?"

Kang reaches out his hand without looking and flicks a black button on the wall that looks exactly like twenty other black buttons around it. The beeping stops.

"They didn't warn us how long we'd have to listen to that," I say.

"They didn't warn us about most of the things that could actually go wrong."

"Really? It felt like Mission Leader was reciting from the Bible of Terrifying Worst-Case Scenarios for two years straight."

"That was just what they could predict. The interesting shit is going to be all the gruesome things they couldn't imagine."

"You seem excited about that."

Kang shrugs. "I guess I am."

"Why's that?"

"I think one of them is already happening."

°°°


What’s the worst part of long-voyage space travel? There’s no shortage of options. A bathroom the size of a mini-fridge that leaves you a permanent hunchback. Having to crawl through humming tubes that connect the barely larger “communals” so that it feels like you’re living in a maze of MRIs. Masturbating in a sleep pod the dimensions of a coffin with one panel made of glass to ensure there’s zero privacy to go along with the claustrophobia.

All strong contenders, no question. But my personal nominee would have to be the first crap after being juiced awake from extend-sleep. I could attempt a description of the experience but just thinking about it brings a stabbing pain in my hunchback.

And then there's what Mission Leader referenced in our training, in an even more ominous tone than when describing the effects of cosmic radiation poisoning, or roasting alive on atmospheric entry: "the interpersonal risks."

The Valiant was launched from beyond the aura of the Earth's blue glow seven months ago. It would've been a long time to be awake, twiddling your thumbs. The necessity for extend-sleep didn't come from concerns about our boredom, however, but from our potential to go apeshit in a ship that felt (and often smelled) like being inside a sardine can. And outside? Nothing but space. Thousands of people, a handful of nations, and several billions of dollars have gone into this mission. It would be a shame for it to fail because the crew decided to stick sporks in each other's throats just for a change of pace.

We know we were individually chosen at least in part for our skill sets, the practical things we can do: Blake is crew leader and pilot, Kang is the engineer, and I'm the medical officer. There's overlap in there too-I know enough that I could fly the landing pod if I had to. Probably. Kang's been taught how to amputate a gangrenous arm or leg, and Blake seems able to do just about anything.

Our skills weren't the only reason we were selected though. There were better, more experienced engineers and pilots and doctors among the thousand candidates that got cut. As a crew, the main test was whether we'd be able to keep the sporks down for the journey and, assuming safe arrival, minimize conflict for the remainder of our lives, aka the "breathing hours" we have left, as measured by the available oxygen inside the base's walls. You need to get along, as Mission Leader put it, her arms stacked like a pair of steel bars over her chest. And we do. We get along. Even if that's not exactly the same thing as liking each other.

We're going to Mars and never coming back.

If all goes according to plan, the three of us-the entirety of Valiant's crew-will be the first humans to live and die on a planet other than Earth. A history-making triumph for some, a bleak honor for others. My own membership being with the latter camp. So why sign up? Why lie about being comfortable in small spaces, make up a story about dreaming of reaching the stars since I was a little girl, put up with the Mission Leader's physical and psychological abuse throughout the training and crew selection process?

I have no fucking idea.

I know it doesn't make sense, to come this far without a good reason. Which is why I haven't shared it with anyone-my crewmates or Mission Leader or the battery of psych quizmasters testing our resolve. Sometimes I think I've come all the way out here to find out.

°°°


“You better follow me,” Kang says, and then he’s crawling into the tube that leads to Operations.

I'd asked him what he meant about something bad already happening, aware that he wasn't going to answer me, that he'd leave that for Blake to do. This may have been an adherence to protocol, though I strongly suspect that it's just another point on the Asshole Spectrum for Kang. Not that he's a bad guy, not an outright menace or anything. In fact, there's a lot about him to admire: loyalty, courage, a surprisingly goofy sense of humor. He's just kind of a dick. Low-range irritating in the way of an older brother, or at least what I imagine an older brother would be like if I had one.

Only child, parents both gone. It could be this "adult orphan" status even helped my candidacy. I sort of get it if it did. Here's what I don't get: Why they put the three of us, one woman and two men, all straight, together when we're not allowed to have sex. Maybe they evaluated the attraction levels between us and didn't see that worry ever coming up. Can they do that? I have no idea. But we had to take so many psych tests and sit through so many interactive scenarios, they probably know more about us than we do ourselves, including any undiscovered fetishes or erotic triggers.

Sex is where everything goes wrong, apparently. There aren't many elements more essential to achieving the need to get along goal than eliminating that particular complication. It would be important to know if jealousy might arise between Kang and Blake as we wait two years for the next half dozen "pioneers" to join us. Or maybe I might turn out to be the issue. Maybe I have a secret thing for one of them, or both, and sex this early in the mission-pregnancy being the main but far from only resulting problem-is strictly against protocol.

This is not a reproductive phase of our colonization, Mission Leader would remind me. She repeated this more than anything else. You are initial base occupation only. The baby-making comes later-too late for you.

Yet here I am, watching Kang scooch into the tube, reflecting not for the first time on how I would never date a man like him in a thousand years, but wouldn't mind fucking him in this hopeless bucket if the mission laws didn't forbid it.

See? There's got to be five whole seconds right there of me thinking about it. Wasted time. How did that inefficiency get through the tests?

I cleanse my mind of the dirtiest of dirty bits. Then I get down on my knees and follow Kang's ass into the tube's white glow.

3

Blake is waiting for us in Operations. His Easily Distracted By Football coffee mug is in the holder of the arm of his pilot's chair. He looks like a trucker to begin with, and never more so than from the pose he's in now, leaning back, squinting at us like signposts through a windshield. I notice the mug is empty. If he didn't have time to fill it with instant joe before calling us in here, right out of extend-sleep, there's got to be something truly pear-shaped going on.

Not that he tells us right away. Kang takes his chair next to him and I sit in mine across the cramped mess table. Blake sits up straight and places his hands on his knees but his brain's not here, kidnapped by intruding thoughts. It seems like someone will have to say something to bring him back, so I decide it'll be me.

"What's up, boss?"

"There's some irregularities on comms," he says, and immediately it's confirmed: this is serious. He only chooses words like that-irregularities-when he's trying to diminish the significance of a problem. Normally, when it's a situation he has in hand, he would be saying "There's some fuckups on comms."

"What kind?"

"At some point during our extend-sleep-we lost contact with Citadel."

Citadel being the name of the base awaiting our arrival. Citadel being our home on Mars, the place we're due to land on in ten days.

"Is it our tech that's down, or the base's?"

"That's the odd part. Our tech looks to be good, and so is Citadel's."

"What's the problem then?"

"Nobody's answering at the other end."

"The worker bots?" Kang says.

"The logs indicate they were operational up until forty-two hours ago. Now they can't answer a call."

"They've got to know we're almost there," I say. "It's all they've been programmed to do. Get the base ready for us."

"They should be polishing the silverware," Kang says.

"I agree there isn't an obvious explanation. Every part of their mission has been accomplished, from all the indications I've seen. They're good machines," Blake says. "But now they've gone quiet."

We all go quiet too. Absorbing. Calling on the parts of our training intended to prevent us from freaking out when things go wrong. Controlled breathing. Staying solution focused. Refusing to be the weak link in the chain. Remembering why we're here. All of them helpful except the last one.

The three of us are equally aware what this news means, how jeopardizing it is to the mission-to our lives. We're puzzling out the work-arounds or justifications for calling everything off and heading home. We're also handling the turn of events in our own trademark ways.

Kang is moving his head from side to side in microshakes ostensibly meant only for himself. He takes bad luck personally. Of course this shit is happening to me. It's his way of managing anxiety by converting it into cosmic injustice. An unfair god he has no choice but to don his armor and face off against.

And then there's Blake.

He doesn't just look like any trucker. He looks like a trucker who went to Yale, which he, in fact, did. I'm fairly sure why he signed up, beyond the obvious motivations of a career military guy looking for a chance to leap up the rank ladder. He needed a new life after the one he had lined up was taken away. Marriage. Kids. Things he would've been good at, but never really got the chance to prove it. He was briefly married before his wife died. "Gone before we had a chance to empty the boxes in our first apartment." I asked, once, how she passed. "That's not for you," he said, sharp as a knifepoint between my ribs. I haven't gone close to asking again.

What I do know is that it rewired him beyond the usual ways that come with grief. In Blake's case, the takeaway was that fate saw him as unqualified for partnership or parenthood or any earthbound contentment. He was meant for the solitude of cramped pods, long silences, a journey as far from humanity as conceivable. This is how he put it to me, more or less, on the occasions when beer and Chivas eased it out of him.

"We're getting a message," Kang says.

We all know who it's going to be before her voice comes over the speakers: Mission Leader. In a situation like this she wouldn't allow anyone else to communicate with us, even if she had to be shaken awake from sleep in her bed-though the question of who would do the shaking and what her bedroom might look like or any other detail of her private life was impossible to envision.

Given our current position in relation to Earth it takes about eight minutes for a transmission to find the Valiant. It lets me see Mission Leader in her chair at the command center, waiting for her words to reach us, the team around her silent as owls.

Then she's with us. Occupying the Operations room as her voice comes from every direction at once, like a shared piece of our minds.

"You must continue."

There's a long pause after that. So long that we bounce from weighing if that's all she's going to say, to wondering if the comms connection has been lost, to thinking she's expecting a reply. It doesn't help that she has the disorienting talent for speaking clearly and in riddles at the same time.

"Detach the landing pod and bring it down to Citadel on your own," the voice abruptly returns, our bodies jolting in our chairs. "The worker bots would be helpful in this, but not essential. This is something we've anticipated, therefore something that can be done. There may be challenges waiting for you at the surface, whether limited to the worker bots or something of a larger scale-it makes no difference. You are the first delivery of human pioneers to Mars. There is no going back. No concession to deviation, or surprise, or failure. You must continue. Remove the possibility of any other option from your minds. There is no other option. You must continue."

I wonder now, as I wondered a thousand times during our training, if Mission Leader's way of repeating certain phrases in her instructions-You must continue-was a trick she picked up on her own, or if it was part of her own training, back when she was unthinkably younger. Either way, it works. The hypnotism of the repetition combined with her tone, an uncanny balance of pitiless and motherly. There is no going back. There are no other options. We will continue.

"Roger that, Mission Leader," Blake answers without a look at me or Kang. "We'll begin the landing measures immediately. End transmission."

We all wait a second before considering speaking. None of us want a straggling comment to be caught by Mission Leader's ears.