“But you understand how the Q-expansion works,” Yuri said, speaking around a mouthful of egg. “The Rip works down the scales, larger structures breaking up first. The planet will go first,
Rocks popping into dust, at smaller and smaller scales.”
“Are there instruments inside?”
“Yes. It should keep working, taking data until the expansion gets down to the centimeter scale, and the Rip cracks the sphere open. Even then there’s a plan. The sphere will release a cloud of even finer sensor units, motes we call them. It’s nanotechnology, Myra, machines the size of molecules. They will keep gathering data until the expansion reaches molecular scales. There’s nothing they could come up with beyond that. Paula says the design goal is to make it through to the last microsecond. You could gather another thirty minutes of data that way.”
“Then it’s worth doing.”
“Oh, yes.”
Myra hefted the sphere. “What a wonderful little gadget. It’s a shame nobody will be able to use its data.”
“Well, you never know,” Yuri said.
She set the sphere on the table. “And these pills?”
He fingered the bag of pills dubiously. “Jenny at Lowell said she would prepare something like this.” Jenny Mortens was New Lowell’s doctor, the only one left on Mars. “You know what they are. It might be easier, this way, just to take them.”
“It would be a shame to come this far and then give up at the last minute. Don’t you think? And besides, I have my mother to think about.”
“Fair enough.” He grinned, and with a flip he lobbed the pill bag into a waste bin.
She looked at her watch. “I think we’d better get moving.
There isn’t much time.”
“Right.” He stood, and stacked the dishes. “I think we can waste a little water and wash up.” He glanced back at her. “How are you feeling about using the suits?”
They both wanted to be outside the base in the final moments.
But she had been unsure about wearing a suit. “I do think I’ll want a bit of human contact, Yuri.”
He smiled. “Quaintly put. Too late to be embarrassed now.”
“You know what I mean,” she said, a bit irritated to be teased about it.
“Of course I do. Look — I’ve fixed it. Come out with me into the suits and see what I’ve done. Trust me. I think you’ll like it. And there’ll always be time to come back inside if not.”
She nodded. “All right. Let’s get this place shipshape first.”
So they tidied up. After one last gulp of coffee — her last ever mouthful, she thought — Myra cleaned the dishes in a little of their precious hot water, and stacked them away. She went to the bathroom, washed her face and brushed her teeth, and used the lavatory. The suits had facilities, of course, but she’d rather not have to resort to that.
She was running down through a list of simple human actions for the last time, the very last. She would never sleep again, or eat, or drink coffee, or even use a bathroom. She had begun to think this way since waking this morning, despite her best efforts to maintain business as usual.
With Yuri, she walked around the station one last time. Yuri was carrying the black sensor globe from Lowell. They had already shut most of Wells down, but now they ordered the station AI to run the systems down to minimum, and to turn off the lights, so that as they walked they left gathering pools of darkness behind them. Everything was tidy, put away where it should be, cleaned up. Myra felt proud of how they had left things.
At last only one fluorescent tube was left burning, in the EVA dome, illuminating the small hatchways through which they had to climb to get into their suits. They pulled on their inner suits, and Yuri passed the sensor ball out through an equipment hatch.
“You go left, I go right,” he said. “If you need to scratch your nose, now’s the time.”
They paused. Then they hugged, and Myra drank in his scent.
They broke. “Lights,” Yuri called. The last tube died, leaving the station dark. “Goodbye, H.G.,” Yuri said softly to his base.
Myra had never heard him use that name before.
Myra opened her hatch, and with a skill developed over her months on Mars she slid feet-first into her suit. When she wormed her right hand into its sleeve, she got a surprise. The glove she had been expecting wasn’t there. Instead her hand slid into a warm grasp.
She leaned forward. By her suit lights she saw that the glove of her suit had been cut away, and her right sleeve had been stitched to Yuri’s left.
Yuri was looking out of his helmet. “How do you like my needlework?”
“Good work, Yuri.”
“The suits don’t like it, of course. They both think they are breached. But the hell with them. The temporary seal hasn’t got to hold for long. Of course we’re going to have to do everything together, like Siamese twins. How’s your suit?”
She had already run it through its diagnostic check. She looked over Yuri’s chest display, to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, and he did the same for her. “All fine, apart from bleating about the gloves.”
“Very good,” he said. “So we stand. Three, two, one—”
Their hands locked together, they straightened up. Her exoskeletal multipliers whirred, and her suit came loose of the dome with a sucking sound.
Out of habit she turned, picked up a soft brush, and swept the dome seals clean of Mars dust. Yuri did the same. It was a bit awkward with their hands locked together.
Then Yuri bent to pick up the sensor ball in his right hand, and they walked forward.
It was pitch dark, and the snow fell steadily, shapeless flakes of frozen Martian air illuminated by their suit lights. But the ground was reasonably clear; they had got a path swept yesterday.
A little robot camera rolled after them, even now recording, recording. It got stuck in a snow bank. Myra kicked it clear and it rolled ahead, red lights glowing.
Yuri stopped, and put the sensor sphere down on the ground before them. “Here, do you think?”
“I guess so. I don’t imagine it matters much.”
He straightened up. The snow continued to fall. Yuri held out a hand and caught flakes. They looked like fat moths settling on his gloves, before they sublimated away. “Ah, God,” he said, “there’s so much wonder here. You know, these flakes have structure. Each snowflake nucleates around first a grain of dust, then water ice, and only then an outer shell of dry ice. It is like an onion. And it all falls here, every winter. Thus three global cycles, of dust, water and carbon dioxide, intersect in every snowflake. We barely began to understand Mars.” His voice had an edge of bitterness she hadn’t heard in him in months. “To some this would be hell,” he said.
“The cold, the darkness. Not to me.”
“Nor me,” she whispered, squeezing his hand inside their stitched-together sleeves. “Yuri.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. These last few months, for me—”
“Better not to say it.”
There was a sound like a door slamming, transmitted to them through their suits. An alarm chimed in Myra’s ears, and lights lit up on her chin display.
The ground shuddered.
“Right on cue,” Yuri said.
They looked at each other. It was the first real sign since the disappearance of the sun that something remarkable was happening.
Fear fluttered in her throat. Suddenly she wished this were not happening, that they could go back into the station and carry on with their day. She clung to Yuri’s hand, and they bumped against each other in the bulky suits, like two green sumo wrestlers. Yuri twisted, trying to see the watch strapped to his arm outside his suit.
The ground shook more violently. And then ice spurted around them, fine splinters of it. They turned to see, hands still clasped. A hab can had ruptured, and its air and water were escaping, instantly freezing in a shower that
