NOVEL NEXT Chapter 95: Departure
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Claire: It's just stressful, Harry. They're riding to Mars and back, in something our welders, the same guys I just had to put on warning for pissing outside the sheds, put together.
Harry: Huh. I thought I was going to be able to say something comforting, but now I'm worried too. Thanks for that.
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Sol 500 FY 26, 05:00 Mars Time, Bonestell Crater Colony
Gordon woke before the alarm. Not suddenly, but with the dull inevitability of someone dreading the day to come. The chill of the room had settled into his joints overnight, and when he stretched, the crackle of his spine was louder than expected. He lay there for a few more seconds, then swung his legs out of bed. It would be an hour and a half until the launch, but every minute felt already claimed.
Marie was already up, boots half-laced, hair back with a colored scarf she hadn't even bothered to retie. She didn't speak at first. Just looked at him, soft and far away, like she was trying to memorize something about his face.
"It doesn't feel like it's been long enough," she told him, quietly.
He washed his face.
"I don't think it's ever supposed to. But. . .I have to go through the right channels, or they'll just export me back to Earth with the freight. You heard the man."
Flowers had snorted when Marie said Gordon should just stay, stating that all the i's must have a dot and t's have a cross. Gordon resented the necessity—even if he HAD told Harry he'd be back. The administrator wanted his sixty thousand dollars.
"Feels wrong," she insisted.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
He nodded, and she nodded back. A mutual agreement to stop pushing the issue. Like automatons, they moved through the pre-flight checklist.
The suit this time was a full EVA exo, not the lighter reentry rig he'd come in. His suit was, it seemed, still not laundered yet. "I swear I didn't pee in it or anything," he'd complained when he'd heard that, but it was no use. Suits got cleaned after X uses. His was at X uses.
The bulky suit was even worse than the other one.
Marie helped him cinch the seals, checked the ports. She didn't fumble, but did hesitate before handing him his helmet. He gave her another goodbye kiss—this would make at least the dozenth.
Down at the launch platform, Vera was waiting. She hugged Marie first.
"He seems set on you," Vera said, her voice light but edged. "And this."
Marie blinked. Vera's hugs were rare and warm—for anyone who wasn't Lark, anyway. She didn't say anything else. Just watched Gordon trundling up the stairs in his bulky outfit.
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Gordon climbed into the capsule and began his strap-down procedure. Next to him, Hiram already sat, composed, reading a martian aluminum teletape. The old-timey superstitions about using electronic devices while flying were alive and well in Hiram's head. The man was addicted to hard copy. He'd even built a secure document repository for the twin suns patent and process—gold dvds, in a machined steel vault, a series of copper poles down into the water table, even preventing overheating from melting his precious intellectual property.
The man was impressively paranoid, sometimes.
The final checks came from below. A vibration as the fusion cores stabilized at a performance load, then silence. Then a tone. Then—
The world was heavy. The air was heavy. Vibrations rattled Gordon's bones. He could hear the inferior regolith-based fuel rattling like pea gravel deep in the engine tanks, shaking in the launch like maracas.
The reactor banks pulsed as the nuclear thermal drive spun up, heating the raw mass for launch. Above it all, a faint hum of charged plasma bled through the hull: the fusion vent lines were active, feeding just enough He3 exhaust into the magnetic field to stabilize the nozzle. Minimal mix. Just enough to shape the thrust without wasting fuel.
From the ground, it must have looked beautiful. A golden streak across the blue-dawn sky. But inside the capsule, all Gordon saw was the digitally recreated orb of Mars, shrinking fast.