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Fear is beginning to run through my body. This isn’t just a drill, this is real.
“Let’s go,” Jordan says. He’s put on some loose jogging trousers, but his chest is bare. There are some faint scratch marks on his abdomen; I must have been quite wild last night.
I follow him through the dark station, walking at a brusque pace, almost running. It’s 6am, way before the time I planned to get up. I stayed up late, first because of work, then because of Will and Jordan.
It’s usually quiet at this time, but right now, I can’t even hear the sound of my own footsteps because of the alarm. I wish Bastian would switch it off, surely all of us are awake by now.
When we enter the control room, everybody else is there already apart from Will. He was planning to work in the greenhouses this morning, and they’re the furthest away from the centre of the station.
However, as soon as we’ve taken a seat around the large table, he arrives, breathless, mud staining his cheeks.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “And fucking switch off that alarm. I can’t hear my own thoughts.”
Bastian presses some buttons on the touchpad in front of him and the alarm goes quiet. Finally. It still echoes in my mind though, the sound almost as loud as it was in reality. My ears are ringing, and it takes me a moment to adjust to the sudden silence.
I don’t usually come to this room, even though it’s the heart of the station where all the computers keep track of the systems. Right at the beginning, I managed to connect my comms bracelet to most of the important alerts, so I could communicate with Earth on the go and didn’t have to come to the control room. And for meetings, we usually convene in the common room where we can have drinks and snacks while discussing and planning our work... and our survival, occasionally.
“There’s a bomb,” Bastian finally says into the silence.
Nobody answers. It’s too outlandish. There aren’t any bombs on Mars.
“What?” I ask when nobody else seems to want to speak. “Explain.”
“A pipe burst, I checked it out, I found a bomb hidden behind the pipe. It’s intact, and there’s a timer. That’s the short version.” Bastian runs a hand through his dark brown hair. A few small strands are stuck to his forehead, glued there by the tiny pearls of sweat that are covering his skin.
“And what’s the long version?” I prompt. “When does the timer expire?”
“Two days.” He checks his watch. “Fifty-two hours. And it looks like the bomb has been there a long time. It was covered in dust and even a bit of rust. Maybe it’s even been there from the beginning, who knows. I’m not an expert in this kind of stuff. It’s in a really clever location though. Not somewhere I’d usually check, hidden deep within our maze of pipes and cables. It’s a miracle really that we had the pipe burst this morning, or we’d never have found out until it was too late.”
“Anyone of you ever disposed of a bomb?” Jim asks, his voice dripping with a mixture of sarcasm and fear.
“I’ve watched the Hurt Locker,” Tobias offers unhelpfully, resulting in an irritated glare by Bastian.
I frown, trying to get my head around it all. “Why would anyone put a bomb on a Mars station? It’s not really a terrorist target, especially not now that Earth is busy with the Drowning. They have bigger problems than sending bombs here.”
“That’s why I think it’s been here for a while,” Bastian explains. “Remember the anti-space movement, the fanatics who wanted the resources spent on Mars missions be used to help people on Earth? Maybe it was them.”
I shake my head. “Even if it was them, how did they get a bomb here? Every tiny piece of cargo is recorded and measured, scanned, whatever. Us settlers got exactly one standard sized crate to fill with our personal belongings. I don’t know how big that bomb is, but I barely managed to fit my favourite books in there.”
“They took out some of my seeds,” Will mutters. “If they check seeds, they’d definitely find a bomb, even if it’s in tiny pieces.”
Bastian sighs. “Right now, we don’t need to know how it got here. We need to dispose of it, and quickly. I’ve not examined it properly yet, I wanted to let you all know first, but it looks like it’s attached firmly to some of the most important pipes and cables, including our oxygen supply. If it blows, our life support systems will fail.”
“What kind of bomb is it?” I ask. Not that I know much about bombs. I’ve seen films, watched some documentaries about bomb disposal in Laos, but that’s about it. Once they found an unexploded World War Two bomb close to the apartment complex I used to live in, and we all had to evacuate for the morning while they disposed of it.
Bastian shrugs. “It’s got a timer, lots of cables and a container that I assume contains explosive material. I don’t know shit about bombs. And it’s fused to some very important hardware. I need more time to explore it, but you needed to know first. If this goes badly... well, two days. That’s it.”
Silence meets his words.
“I wish we had internet up here,” Toby mutters. “Or a connection to Earth. It’s been nice to have our peace and quiet from them, but right now, it would be helpful to speak to an expert.”
“No use wanting something that we can’t get,” Jordan says. Of course, he’s the one to stay fairly rational. “Is there a way to separate that part of the station from the rest, so that not everything is affected if the bomb blows? Surely there are ways to make a part of the station self-contained in emergencies?”
Bastian nods. “Yes, we do have that option. The station is set out to have three compartments that can function on their own if needs be. However, the bomb is on the border of two of them. If it blows, we only have a third of the station left for us. And we’ll lose the greenhouse.” He sighs again. “Even if we’re in the self-contained part, we won’t be able to survive for long. We don’t have the resources.”
“Fuck.” Will vocalises what we’re all thinking. We’re so screwed.
“Is the bomb connected to our electricity?” Jordan asks. “Then we could just switch off the power in that part and it won’t be able to detonate.”
