"Good Afternoon."

Sanders wore his usual solemn expression, but with none of the usual dry humor lurking just beneath the controlled exterior, Kapoor noted. Teddy collected his notes, took a deep breath, leveled his gaze in the general direction of the cameras, and began to give the press conference that no NASA administrator ever wanted to give.

It was not a good afternoon.

Even as the press corps listened quietly, focused intently on Sanders' every word, lest any new detail be revealed, the unfortunate truth was that everyone in the room already knew. This press conference was strictly for the record; the official party line from NASA. Window dressing.

Venkat sighed and looked at the floor, willing the conference to be over already.

The actual blow had fallen several hours before, when an already dangerous situation on the surface mission had spun wildly out of control.

An emergency evacuation. Total mission scrub. It was unheard of. No precedent for it. It was just another unlikely scenario in the mission book, nothing more.

But the MAV had been on the very verge of tipping over. They'd had no choice. Or if they did, it was no use arguing the decision now. Lewis had taken her best guess. Tried to keep her crew safe.

History wasn't going to remember the amount of force behind that storm, or any of the reasoning behind the evacuation. Nobody would ever remember that Commander Lewis had made the best choices she could with the information available to her at the time.

There wasn't much doubt in Venkat's mind that the crew of Ares III, the entire mission, and perhaps the entire program, would now forever be tainted by the fact that they'd left their crewmate behind.

Dead.

The first astronaut to die on the surface of Mars.

History would remember that the 16th person to walk on the surface of Mars had also died there.

The news had swept through Johnson Space Center like a different sort of storm.

Kapoor sighed and shifted from one foot to the other as Teddy, at the podium, described the sequence of events, that had brought them here.

To this.

NASA's first astronaut casualty in thirty years.

It didn't seem real.

News had leaked almost immediately, of course. CNN broke the story, quoting inside sources, less than ten minutes after Commander Lewis had conferred with Flight Command. They were a public agency, after all.

They had no secrets.

Not officially.

Space travel was a dangerous occupation once again.

They had a campus full of grief-stricken employees. What would have been the point of a gag order? It wouldn't have stemmed the tide, or changed any of the facts.

"And so, at 5:15 Eastern Standard Time," Teddy was concluding, "The decision was made to conduct an emergency evacuation." For a brief, almost imperceptible moment, Sanders closed his eyes, and Kapoor could clearly see the ponderous weight he bore on his shoulders, as his jaw tightened. But he continued, impassively, "Astronauts Lewis, Martinez, Beck, Vogel and Watney made it safely to the MAV for rendezvous with Hermes, and they are headed for home."

Kapoor held his breath, bracing himself. He didn't like to hear the words, any more than Sanders liked to say them.

"Astronaut Beth Johanssen, however, was struck by debris, and killed."

The crew had been unable to locate her body, carried away, the gods only knew how far by the storm, which had reduced their visibility to near-zero. And they hadn't yet been able to explain why exactly Johanssen's EVA suit had immediately lost its uplink that should have remained solid strong? for several kilometers, even under extreme conditions. Perhaps it was destroyed by a direct hit from the untethered satellite dish,snuffing out her life in an instant.

When he stopped to consider for a moment, he was actually relieved that the crew hadn't been able to find the body. Commander Lewis had attempted a brief search, but with no beacon from Johanssen's suit and no visibility, ninety seconds just hadn't been enough time to make a difference. But that was okay, Venkat told himself; the crew had been spared the extra stressors of seeing their fallen crewmate and having to leave the body behind. There simply hadn't been time to look, and for that, Venkat was grateful.

Sanders didn't stop to take any questions when he had finished reading the prepared statement, despite the myriad shouted requests. Montrose had primed them; but that didn't stop them from asking. He gathered his notes and left the podium abruptly, head bowed. He brushed by several department heads, all of whom knew better than to try and engage with him right now.

On any other day, Venkat would have said that he knew Sanders pretty well. Maybe as well as anyone at NASA did. They'd known one another for years at work, knew each other socially as well. But he'd never seen Teddy look like that. Stooped shoulders, with tired, empty eyes that connected with nothing and no one. Just the thinnest remaining veneer of his usually stoic self.

It scared him a little, to be honest.

He was taking this personally. They all were. But Sanders had been especially fond of Johanssen, Venkat knew that. She had come to NASA's attention at such a young age, before she'd even graduated from MIT. Full of promise and ideas.

Following in Teddy's wake, he noticed Henderson, meters ahead of him, make an attempt to stop Sanders, with one hand raised, an intent expression on Mitch's face, but Teddy almost didn't acknowledge him at all. He made only the slightest gesture with one hand, later, and Henderson backed away, eyes wide.

Mitch glanced his way, and Venkat met his eyes then, and saw the same pain reflected there. He swallowed, and managed a nod in Mitch's direction. This was his crew, too. He felt responsible.

There probably wasn't a single employee in the building today that hadn't contributed to the program in some way. Made some decision, large or small, offered an opinion or suggestion, signed an invoice or conducted research. They'd all worked together to make this program, this mission, happen. They'd put their crew in harm's way and now, the worst had happened.

The very worst.

There was no going back from this, Kapoor thought. The repercussions from Johanssen's death would be felt for many years to come, no doubt.

Someday, all of the fine details would be made clear, all the questions would be answered. Maybe they would be able to learn from mistakes that had been made; maybe future astronauts would one day be safer because of this tragedy.

Today was not that day.

All they really knew, was that five of the crew had survived; but Johanssen, so gifted, burning bright with talent and potential, was no longer.


This was a new kind of darkness, she thought, hazily, when she opened her eyes. Black and disorienting; heavy.

Unsure at first whether she'd been unconscious or asleep and dreaming, she blinked several times, shaking her head as though that might bring things into focus. Make sense of things.

The first thing that caught Beth's attention was the darkness, however. Darker than the surface of Mars would ever, ever be, even considering the lack of atmosphere.

There were no stars. Nothing at all, except, when Beth stared very hard, maybe there was some sort of barely-discernible honeycomb pattern in front of her. She might have been imagining it, it was so faint.

There was nothing here, just blackness.

And no wind at all, come to think of it. That was weird, wasn't it, because…

There had been wind, wild, swirling winds, Beth was sure of it, before-

What the hell just happened?

And then, there was this darkness; there was something just not right about how dark it was.

Why is it this dark? Did I die?

She tried to think back, trying to reconstruct what had happened, but her head was still spinning, and she felt groggy.

That was when she realized that she couldn't move.

Well, that wasn't quite right. She could move. Inside her EVA suit, she could move. Her fingers and toes seemed to flex, just like normal, even if her hands were shaking a little bit from fear.

But the suit would not move, when she pressed her arms outwards, and tried to move her legs. It didn't make sense. The entire suit; it had been immobilized somehow.

How is that even possible?

She flexed her fingers again, and then, experimentally, pulled one of her arms back into the torso portion of her suit, and felt for her heartbeat. It was galloping along; at least double her normal resting rate. Maybe more.

Wait.

Why was she checking her own stats, when her EVA suit was supposed to do all of that for her? Her temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure. All of that should have been easily accessible, at a glance, but...

The heads-up display wasn't active. And that could only mean…

Oh no, oh my god, what the hell is going on here….

There was a rational explanation, of course. There had to be. The suit was in low-power mode, of course. All of the unnecessary extras had been disabled; the HUD, the cameras, the voice activated menu, all of it. She'd been in her EVA suit a long time, then. Longer than a normal EVA, probably. Long enough to force the power source into contingency mode.

Think! She ordered herself to remain calm. They'd been rigorously tested for any signs of claustrophobia, and Beth Johanssen was not prone to panic attacks. She certainly didn't want to succumb to one now.

Breathing too fast will only make me run out of air sooner, she told herself, willing herself to slow her respiration.

This was unnerving, though, to wake up, trapped in her EVA suit, unable to move, in pitch darkness, and not know why. It was difficult not to panic.

She tried again, and failed, to think of a scenario in which she might awaken in a dark place, in an immobilized EVA suit. Now that she took the time to assess things,the back of her head ached, Adrenaline was flowing through her now, her flight-or-fight responses ready but unable to save her.

Beth tried to force herself to breathe in slowly, ordered herself to slow the fuck down. She tried again to start over, go back over what had happened, as best as she could recall.

She exhaled, slowly, and her breath swept back across her face like a warm breeze, oddly comforting.

There had been wind.

Strong wind. Clouds. A storm. An enormous, bruise-like stain that had bloomed across the sky, clouding over the entire Martian horizon. Bearing down straight towards the Hab. The Hab canvas snapping and shaking under the force of the storm. Houston had ordered the crew to suit up in case of Hab breach. (All six of them were already suited up or nearly finished, when Beth had read out the order, and there had been some nervous laughter.) The emergency evacuation. Yes, because of the storm. (It's going to be a lot worse, she'd told Lewis) A really dangerous storm. (We're scrubbed, Lewis had said, while Watney tried to argue with her to wait.) Suiting up. Then, they'd been walking out into the storm, headed to…

The MAV.

Maybe she was in the MAV, she theorized, knowing right away that something seemed very off about that idea, knowing instinctively that wasn't the case. Still, her thought process ran the available information through to reach the inevitable conclusion.

No, not the MAV.

That can't be right.

The gravity.

She knew the difference between microgravity and .4G. She was lying, not floating, inside her EVA suit. There was gravity here, even if there was something very wrong with her suit.

She wasn't in the MAV.

How many possibilities did that leave? What data was she overlooking? She had a headache, but not the garden-variety sort that she'd come to associate with microgravity… no, it felt like she'd actually taken a blow to the back of her head, and the padding in her helmet hadn't absorbed the shock very well.

Is that why I don't remember?

Had she completely blanked out the part where she'd made it to the MAV and the crew had launched, made the rendezvous back to Hermes, and she, the ship's reactor technician, had personally restarted the centripetal gravity?

This seemed kind of unlikely. That would be an awfully long sequence of events for there to be no trace of any of it in her memory.

Or else….

And now there was another possibility taking form in place of the discarded theories and this one had the ring of truth to it.

She tried again to move, and this time, using all her strength, she was able to move one arm inward a few centimeters. The uneven, gritty scrape of sand on the outermost layer of her suit told her all that she needed to know.

Or else….

She'd never made it to the MAV.

She was still on Mars.

It was hours or even days later.

And she was trapped beneath rubble, right now, buried alive underneath untold tons of red sand.