Electricity coursed through Hao’s nerves. He wanted to smash everything in his cabin but knew the futility of such an act. Instead, he sat like a caged animal, mind racing through the events of the day, trying to find the way out that didn’t exist. Time seemed to stop as minutes turned to hours while nothing changed. He didn’t calm down, he didn’t arrive at any state of acceptance. He wondered how long he could live this way, and joked bitterly to himself that maybe he wouldn’t need to find out.

There was a soft knock at the door, and he opened it to see a red-eyed Rho standing there. He invited her in, and they hugged in silence for a few minutes.

“How are you doing?” he asked, then mentally kicked himself for the stupid question.

Rho didn’t answer, but stared into space for a moment. “I thought you might want some company.”

“I’d want some company? Jesus Rho, who cares what I want right now?”

“Well, I want some company, so suck it.” The spark in her eyes was still though, though not as bright.

Neither said anything for a while, both lost in thought and grateful to share space with another human.

“Are you angry?” Hao asked eventually, unsure if he was being insensitive.

“Oh, I know where you’re going with that. I know what they’re all saying. Yes I’m angry, but not at anybody in particular. At the world maybe—the unfairness of it all.”

“That’s very levelheaded of you.”

“I think there’s a little bit of cowardice in everyone when tragedy hits like this. They want to find the people to blame, to vent their anger on a victim so they don’t have to process the pain. It must be the overly ambitious company, or the stupid administrators, or the heartless businessmen on Earth pushing too hard to make a profit. It can’t be that no-one is that evil or incompetent, that sometimes the universe punches you in the gut for no reason—that’s too terrifying.”

Hao didn’t reply.

“I get very analytical in difficult moments.” she explained. “Helps me create the illusion of control that everyone needs to hold onto to stay sane.”

“I envy you. I’m not sure how to make sense of anything right now.”

“You’ve had a rough day.”

“That’s nothing compared to what you must be going through.”

Rho shrugged. “On the one hand I’ve had a lot of practice for reasons I won’t go into. On the other hand we were always trying to anticipate this moment. Martell used to sit me down and tell me I had to be prepared for this. He made me think through the scenarios—which was freaking horrible— but he’d been there before you see. A few of his friends died wing-suiting, so he knew what it was like. Jesus I loved him.” she sobbed. After a pause, she continued. “But he’s with me now, and he won’t have me give up, or break down, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Do you think we’ll ever know-?”

“I know what happened. That’s why this is a bit easier for me than the others, because they’re getting lost in their imagination. That’s where the real beast lives, you know, the primal instinct that wants to run for the trees and smash whatever gets in the way.”

Rho paused again, arranging her thoughts. “I studied industrial disasters, and I did my thesis on the Deepwater Horizon fire. The popular narrative is that BP were evil and throwing lives away for profit, and nobody bothered to ask why a rig which had won the “Safest Rig” award for seven years straight exploded. It has a lot to do with the bullshit media culture we live under, but that’s another story. The truth is timeless and universal. In every human endeavor there are failures at every level that get missed, or are too minor to worry about, but, once in a while they all combine at the worst possible time to produce a tragedy—and that’s it.

“So, our refueling station… Well, the higher leadership underestimated how quickly the colony would grow, with all the billionaires on Earth wanting a trip, all the media attention and so on; the traffic needed to keep it growing got out of control. This was dangerous because we’re not close to being self-sufficient, and enthusiasm has a life of it’s own. We call it ‘go-fever’, and sometimes it takes over, pushing rationality to the side. Rather than throttling back expectations, or risk disappointing the fanbase, donors or politicians they drove ahead. They had a new trajectory plan, without the fueling infrastructure in place to support it. They improvised and built the fueling station, and built a new procedure with a crew cobbled together from different teams.

Hao listened intently and was surprised to see that he also found a soothing acceptance from breaking the nightmare down to its component parts.

“They could have saved the situation,” Rho continued “If they had selected strong leadership to oversee this new team, but between office politics, indecisiveness, and lack of experience, no one really rose to the occasion. This was the reality as I saw it, and I pushed back and argued and they told me it was all in hand—that I was overreacting, and it was way outside my area of expertise anyway, which was true. Now I’m going to guesstimate what happened next. A group of individuals not used to working together, without oversight, and with a roughly hashed-out plan—working against a tight schedule—made some small mistakes, and didn’t communicate properly.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

She paused for a moment.

“I know they believed they had a rock-solid fire suppression system on the station, but almost certainly too many unknowns cropped up. Maybe the ship couldn’t be positioned the right way, maybe there was a fuel pressure imbalance and they had to go over a safety line to make it work. Could be a dozen things. The problem would be that, without realizing it, they would have ended up in a situation that was beyond the capability of their backstop fire system to control. Then all it took was a bad seal, a faulty reading, a spark, and things got out of control faster than anyone imagined was possible.”

“What you’re saying sounds kind of shocking. This organization has such a great reputation.”

“I think you underestimate how easily these kinds of situations can creep up on you. Remember the Apollo One fire?”

“Yes, though I don’t know the details.”

“Loose wiring sparked in a pure oxygen environment. The smartest PHDs, engineers and astronauts in the world, all part of a national effort to achieve a milestone in the history of humanity, and they all freely admitted that not a single one of them sat down for five seconds to think—what if there’s a spark in a one hundred percent oxygen pressurized cabin?”

“That’s incredible.”

“People here got comfortable with success, stopped questioning – and now our friends and loved ones are dead.” Rho’s eyes teared up again.

“Do you think things will change?”

Rho shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean—I hope so, but can you ever truly remove ego from a group of human beings? It takes eternal vigilance and not everyone in our leadership has that kind of character.”

Hao paused for a moment, steeling himself for what had to be said. “Before you came in, I wasn’t sure I could go back out there again. But when I listen to you talk, I feel like I can do anything. I don’t know why Kerry kept calling me the tough guy.”

“Because she was attracted to you.” Rho chuckled.

Hao cradled his head in his hands. He wanted to say something, but a wave of guilt washed over him.

“When I got back to my cabin” Rho said, “I vomited into the toilet for a while, and then I locked myself in my wardrobe and cried for two hours straight. For a while there, I was straight up thinking of quitting, and they would let me too, after what happened. That was a frightening temptation.”

“Will you?”

“No. I’ll stay the next two years, and I’ll do the work my husband was willing to give up his life for. Because he’s gone and he doesn’t get to be part of all this, all that he spent his life dreaming about, and working towards. So I have to do it for him.”

Hao couldn’t hold it in any longer, and he broke into sobs while Rho held him. His shoulders shook and his heart ached with the pain he had kept locked away from the others. But he knew Rho wouldn’t let him run away this time—she would drag it out of him. Just like he would drag himself out of his cabin in a day or two, and head back out to the red desert, though the thought made his limbs tremble.

“I used to be afraid of flying.” He began, talking slowly at first. “I always took the train in Vietnam. Never imagined I could tolerate being in the air. But my younger brother, Duc, loved to talk about space travel. He would collect all the models and spend hours gluing them together, painting them just the right colors, getting all the stickers to sit perfectly. He played the video games, and when he landed on the moon, he would come racing into my room yelling ‘Hao, I did it, I did it, I can be an astronaut!’. I would throw a book at him and tell him to stop bothering me, because I didn’t care at all about any of it. Who would be dumb enough to sit on an explosion and fly off into the void of space? Well, it’s insanity.”

“Total lunatics.” Rho agreed, and they both laughed.

“But he studied hard, and his grades were amazing, and he was even getting ready for junior flight school.”

Hao’s face grew sombre with the next memory, that he seldom dared to revisit. “Well, I was leaving for college, and—I don’t know—was having some bad day over a girl or something stupid, and he was watching a launch on tv, but I wanted to watch something else, and it turned into one of those stupid arguments.”

Rho nodded. “I have brothers.”

“But I lost it, and I told him his interest in space was pointless, and he would never be an astronaut. I said the Martian colony would never happen, and he was wasting his life. And he didn’t say anything, just watched me with tears in his eyes while I spat on his dream. Then I stormed out and left for college. The next day I got a phone call and they told me he died in a crash. Some drunk piece of shit swerved into his friend’s car on the highway.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We mourned and moved on. I was a successful engineer; I made a lot of money, made my parents proud, had a nice car, nice girlfriends. But every time something appeared in the news about the colony I would think of Duc, and how passionate he was for this single incredible goal, and how I didn’t really care about anything. I just worked to enjoy life, and I often wondered why it should have been him killed in such a meaningless way and not me. Then I saw the colony began recruiting engineers instead of astronauts, and I thought… well…”

His voiced trailed off, but Rho waited patiently.

“It scared the hell out of me, but I thought I didn’t have the right to refuse. Duc’s dream should survive whether I like it or not. Or what is the point of anything?”

“I wish I had a brother like you, Hao.” Rho said sincerely. “My brothers are assholes.”

They talked for hours, revisiting memories of the friends they had lost, laughing and crying—bemoaning the lack of alcohol to properly celebrate the lives of such people. As time passed Hao felt the grief begin to ease, though it never lost its biting edge. As Rho’s indomitable conviction warmed his blood, he felt a new sensation. At first, he couldn’t place it, but after a moment he realized it was anger, and it burned hot with righteousness.

“They need to build a monument, in the central cavern.” He insisted.

Rho smiled. “Agreed, but for me the colony will always be the monument. And the new world that will come after it, that will never forget their names.” She stood up, running a hand through her hair. “Well, we both need to sleep and eat. Shall we take a day to rest before we get back to work?”

Hao nodded. “I’ll be ready.” In that moment he knew that damnation could take the rest of the universe before he would let their colony fail.

“See you in a couple of days Martian.” Rho shot back as she closed the cabin behind her.

Hao slept deeply and soundly, though when he woke the grief came rushing back. Pushing it aside, the the puzzle of the sheared nozzle swam into his mind, flooding his nerves with electricity. He shoved his cabin’s blinds open, wincing at the unfamiliar scrape of metal as an orange glow filled the room. Once he had dressed, he paused and stared out at the world beyond, letting the bright glow of the Martian sun warm his bones. As his eyes drifted across the low hills and scattered rocks, he realized that—though he had not noticed it before— the desert was as much golden as it was ruddy.