Falling Apart

It's morning. I'm putting on my suit to finalise the connections for the new solar field that we brought over from Jamal. I have to keep going. I know what to do, I just don't know why I'm doing it. None of us have seen Asya since we came back from Smaug; she took the rover out yesterday morning, saying she was 'heading south', and didn't come back until dusk. Then she grabbed some food and retired to her bunk without a word.

Annika seems more distant than before, as if she's weighed me up and found that I'm a paperweight who will hold her down; Don always talks to me, but it's all business. It feels like I've lost all my friends. Abdul Qawi still spends most of his time asleep or staring out the window. I think he gets up at night. So I rarely sit and talk to him like we did three days ago.

Don comes and checks my suit, reports each connection and seal with a mutter. I notice that his fingertips are badly chapped. The skin is cracking. That's happening to my toes and my cheeks. The dust. We have to keep the dust out. Then he's gone with a bleak, "Have a good walk."

What's happening to us? Is it just me? It seems like we're drifting apart in a fog of our own making.

Soon I'm outside. If there's any time of day I like on Mars so far, it's early morning. The light shoots over the land almost horizontally, painting the taller rocks and the Hab while throwing the dips and troughs into shade. I look over to the northeastern horizon, beyond which Smaug sits, clinging to its mystery. We will find out soon enough, I think, but it's irritating to be caught in the middle.

Don's meant to be my partner for this job, walking out with me, but he wanted to work on some science he's writing, and he's in the wardroom on the radio with me. It's against our procedures to go out alone, it's not so safe if there's an accident, but this is what we're doing today. "I'm picking up the array bundle," I report. It takes me a while to find the best way of gripping the bundle of flexible solar panels with these thick gloves. The morning light glances off my visor and fragments into diamond and star patterns.

"Roger," he says.

The first walk, on landing day, this suit felt squeaky-clean. Already there is fine grit in the cuffs, collar and gloves, and I'm developing calluses wherever it rubs me. And it smells. But it's a good home-from-home, this suit. It keeps me alive.

"I'm laying out the bundle next to the others."

"Roger."

The roborover plowed the ground fairly smoothly here, but I have to put the bundle down first and move a dozen small rocks which would otherwise mess up the new solar field.

"Need to replace a couple of cells. Damaged in transit maybe. The spares are back by the Hab." I do that, then it's ready to connect. I connect each sub-array to the bus, then walk up the line to the junction where the existing two fields have their connection. I lift the connection block up in one glove, plug the new one in and secure the fastening, but as I'm checking the voltage on my meter I get Don yelling in my ears: "Marco! What did you do? The lights are flickering – we have a blackout here!"

By the time I get him to calm down and tell me what's happening, Annika and Asya are in my ears too. They report that every electrical system except the life support has cut out. At least the comms has its own battery backup. The power system shows that the solar field is supplying about half of what it was. What did I do? We should have fifty percent more power now, not fifty percent less.

Annika's checking the batteries. Asya is pulling the breathing gear out of a locker in case they lose life support too. I know they could breathe what air is in the Hab for quite a while, but she's doing the right thing.

Me, I'm staring at the connection block and spinning my gears. What could have done this? I stare along the solar fields. One, two, the old ones installed by the robots, and which were working a few seconds ago. Three, the new one, which hasn't been tested since before launch. I kneel down awkwardly. Examining the connectors more closely, I can see a white powdery crust around the flexible joints where the insulated wires run into the thick hose leading to the Hab. What's that? I tell the others what I'm seeing. The connector from the new solar field looks fine and shiny – it's the older ones which look like they've been encrusted by sea salt or the Martian equivalent, given that there's no sea here right now, and hasn't been for millions of years. I pull out one of the connectors and the pins fall apart. No! How can I connect it back in? They seem to have eroded right down to a stub. And the connector assembly is full of this white stuff too. It's some sort of corrosion. It's so thickly designed that I can't see a way to improvise a temporary connection. Not right away.

So for the rest of the day I work on that. The Hab is surviving; we have air and water and some heat, although at night we're going to shiver because the outside temperature power-dives by about fifty to one hundred Centigrade.

Asya comes out with me when I go out with all the tools and odd pieces of wiring I can find. But there's no spare for this connector. That's not good. I remember this point coming up about a year ago: I argued that we could not take spares for every last component, or we would end up needing twice the number of launches, or a much, much larger rocket, and SSI couldn't rustle up the funds for either. So we were selective. We debated and voted and trimmed the spares list down to the essentials, bravely believing that we could make it through and improvise if the other parts wore out quicker than they could be resupplied from Earth. We do have the 3-D printers, after all, and the engineers put in thousands of hours trying to reduce every part to a printable design. Of course, this connector isn't one of them: our printer isn't quite capable of laying down these materials.

As the sun edges closer to the flat horizon I'm out there still, trying to twist a wire onto the cable from solar field #1, and I've already stripped some of the insulation off that cable, but I know I won't make a good conductive connection. I have tried soldering, but nothing seems to hold at these low temperatures. I need some different flux. I need a drink and something to eat. This flux is meant for room temperature work. And there's so little electrical power to heat up my soldering gun that I can barely melt the solder without making the Hab's air fans grind to a halt.

Asya gives good suggestions. She looks calm and alert. Hey, all she needs is an expedition or an emergency now and again to keep her spirits up.

Don and Annika do what they can inside. They tell me that A.Q. is fine when they tell him what's wrong. He says that I can fix anything. We'll see about that.

It's time to call it a day. I think I see a way to do this tomorrow. I'll talk to the engineers back at SSI about the right mixture of flux and solder that will survive the low temperatures out here. I'll construct a new connector out of scraps and paper clips if necessary. I'll stay up all night. We'll beat this.

- + - + - + -

How wrong I was. First, I didn't stay up all night – I collapsed in my bunk for a brief rest and didn't wake up until dawn, except to wriggle into my sack. I was chilled to the bone. They turned the thermostat down to three degrees above zero last night to save power. I'm so glad I have this sleeping bag. Second, there's no easy way to get this repair right. Annika and Don are working on setting up the 3-D printers – that might be our best solution, if SSI can redesign the connector body in ABS plastic and nylon. Abdul Qawi is making himself useful and offering suggestions, which often turn out to be good ones, but occasionally he says things which are 180 degrees off the mark.

Asya and I have been out here again for two hours, from the dawn, at the solar fields, cajolling and pleading with this home-made connector contraption. We took the old one apart and found that some of the parts were still useable, but all of the metallic parts had corroded with this white flaky stuff.

The experts of SSI and the university and NASA people who they consult with believe that we have run into perchlorates, and they are trying out various combinations of reactions and catalysts that could have led to this. We took a sample of the white material, ran it through Don's sole surviving spectrum analyser, and sent them the results. They're saying that likely the white material is mostly copper chloride, from the copper in the wire reacting with the perchlorates, but they don't know how that could have happened. They want to know more about the dust. Don says there could be titanium oxide in the dust and other possible catalysts. It's still open season on the chemical pathways that led to this disaster. They're talking about winter frost and how the perchlorates lower the freezing point of water, so in the summer the connector pins could get wet. But right now I'm only concerned with fixing this thing. Then we will have to inspect every last joint and fixture that may have come into contact with the dust over the past Mars year before we arrived.

We float-step back to the Hab in a dark cloud of silence.

Annika reports while we're sitting around the wardroom table for a kind of late breakfast that the Hab batteries are not going to recharge. There's not enough power left over after we've run life support overnight. Then Asya bursts out, "Didn't I tell you? We should have brought an RTG!" We immediately all think of the NewSpace camp and how their RTG has been moved.

That's when I get the idea. I tell them how NewSpace and SSI are using the same designs and the same contractors to produce their solar power systems. It just turned out that several experienced space engineers set up their own company back in 2021 and started designing and manufacturing all kinds of parts that everyone like us needed. I spent weeks at their factory. I learned so much from those old guys.

That means NewSpace almost certainly have at least one spare over there. So all we have to do is go and get it – with the permission of NewSpace back on Earth, I suppose.

Don and Asya look dubious. Another trek across the bleak landscape? Why not? I ask them. It could save our hides.

I think Annika is impressed, or is thinking about being impressed with my idea. She's trying not to look at me eye to eye, but I can tell.

"But if they have one, will it not be even more corroded than ours?" asks Asya. My heart sinks. Of course. Their base was set up two Earth years before Smaug touched down, which is now about four Earth years ago. But what if they had a spare, stashed away in a locker? Oh. We looked through their whole Hab. Nothing.

"Wait. I found this," says Asya, taking out a key from her pocket. "It was in their living area. I thought it was nothing, but if I'm right, this is their universal key for the external Hab lockers. We can check with NewSpace. If there are spare parts, they would be in those lockers." We all grin. This plan is coming together.

Then I go to prepare the rover for the trip, and find that the batteries are almost dead. Asya insists that she plugged in the recharger after her last solo expedition, but it looks like it was loose. And at some point during her outings she has used up the spare batteries too, without recharging them fully. How far afield did she drive? Now with the Hab power so low, there's no way to recharge the rover without turning off life support. "And if we power it down, and the base heating is off, Don says it's hell trying to reboot it," says Annika when I tell her about the rover over the Hab intercom. They're right. Restarting a sub-zero ECLSS is a lengthy procedure that has many ways to fail. Everything freezes, including us. We would need our suits on – they have good heaters in them.

So what now? I squat there in the rover, my hand still on the battery recharger, thinking.

I picture all the resources we have, and it pops into my head just like that. The roborover, and the mods I would need to make. I check, and sure enough, its batteries are still topped up. We're not sure of its range, but it can run for twelve daylight hours without having to recharge. It doesn't have quite the speed of the manned rover, but in five or six hours it could easily reach the Smaug site.

We already have two manual controllers. But one is embedded in the console of the main rover, and the other is a handheld thing that needs recharging every few hours of constant use. So it's simple to make the handheld hook up to the roborover's battery. I just wire up a voltage adaptor. Then all I would need is a saddle.

I gather the others in the wardroom and explain. I show them the hand controller and the recharger which I could take apart and use. "Then in a few hours we will have a spare connector, which we can seal up against the dust," I finish.

They have objections? I expected one or two. But this is too much.

Don: We don't even know if there is a spare connector over there.

Asya: And if your homemade controller breaks halfway? You walk home?

Me: Yeah! Why not?

Annika: This is a crazy idea. The roborover isn't built for long trips!

But she says it with a sly half-grin that warms my insides. What I wouldn't do for some more of that. It feels like days and months since somebody said something nice to me.

Don: And we don't know if that is the right key for their tool lockers.

Asya: I will not allow it. We continue to fix what we have.

Don: Can't you use the roborover's batteries in the other rover? Or recharge one from the other?

I stare at Don. He actually came up with an idea that might work.

But half an hour of investigation cancels that out. No way. The two power systems are not built to be compatible, and I'm not sure that the roborover's more compact cells have enough juice to take the big rover that far. With a lot of work we could do it, but it might take a couple of days. It's back to my plan.

Asya closes down the discussion. "We fix what we have. No more crazy schemes. And don't you dare to suggest using the lander to hop over to the other site. You know there is no fuel for that." She won't tolerate my protests and pleadings but walks off and starts suiting up again.

I say nothing more. This has to be done. We could come close to dying. Sitting around fiddling with broken connectors in those thick suit gloves will get us nowhere, as we discovered this morning. Asya thinks she can do it without me, from the way she was trying to help me outside. She got frustrated when I didn't hand over the tools right away.

I retire to my bunkroom and close the door, saying I need a rest. Then I get a link to SSI Engineering, hoping that Raj Pindwar will answer. It takes three hours to confirm, as he relays my questions to the NewSpace people, but finally I have assurance that, yes, there is a spare solar field connector block in the 113B locker of the NewSpace Hab, and for sure we can borrow it. And all I need is the key Asya found. I could force the lock, maybe, but that's messy.

Asya is still outside, bent over the power connector. The door to her bunk room is closed.

I try the handle. It's not locked. Why would it be?

The key turns up after a quick rummage through her personal drawers. The business end is a tiny hollow cylinder of anodised steel, and it hangs off a small jade pendant by a thin, five-centimetre steel cable coated in rubbery plastic. It makes me feel ugly to do this. But I'm desperate.

Finally, when night falls and I fake some yawns as the others are going to bed, I'm ready to do it. And I'm completely confident that it will work.

- + - + - + -

Onwards to... Flash Drive