Melissa Lewis was not a stupid woman. Nor was she unobservant.
You didn't get as far as she had — especially not in the US Navy's submarine program — without being able to put together the pieces.
When the meeting request had arrived in her inbox, she'd known immediately that it had something to do with Ares IV and something to do with Mark. What other reason would there be to call an urgent meeting of the surviving Ares III crew a few days after Ares IV had touched down on Mars?
She felt a great pressure around her heart and lungs at the thought, as she always did when that terrible moment came up. Melissa had been to war, seen things most people couldn't handle, but that last day on Mars was easily the worst day of her life. She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths to re-center herself.
It had become a familiar ritual in the years since Mars.
By the end of the work day, she'd heard about the press conference scheduled for the next morning — a conference, she'd heard others say, that was being scheduled with the same speed and obfuscation as to its purpose as the conference scheduled to announce Mark's death. Rumours and hushed conversations had raced through NASA all day, and though Melissa remained aloof from the gossip, she'd seen enough sideways glances — especially from the personnel assigned to Mission Control — to confirm her suspicions.
It was about Ares IV. It was about Mark.
By the end of the day, maintaining a stable distance from an emotional breakdown had become difficult. The whispers and stares pressed on her from all sides, making her want to scream.
It was ironic, she thought darkly, that she could sleep like a baby on a submarine that could easily be crushed like a tin can or on a spaceship with only thin walls protecting her from the vacuum, but the constant observation at NASA was undoing her.
It was everything she'd expected to experience after Mark's death, magnified by a thousand-fold because she was experiencing it in person and not the confines of her guilty conscience.
What she couldn't figure out was what Henderson and Montrose were going to tell them.
It couldn't be a body recovery. Melissa knew NASA was talking about recovering Mark's body on the Ares VI mission, and anyway the Schiaperelli Crater was much too far from Acidalia Planitia to make recovery even a remote option for Ares IV.
The only thing Melissa could guess was that something had gone wrong with the mission, some kind of catastrophe that was reminding everyone of the Ares III disaster, and NASA thought it best to inform the Ares III crew so they wouldn't be surprised by it when NASA announced it to the public.
It was a chilling thought.
Melissa had friends on the Ares IV crew, particularly its commander Blair Ortega. She hadn't been able to help getting close with them because she'd spent so much time drilling and working with the crew before the mission. She wasn't going to let them lose someone the way she and her crew had lost Mark.
The idea that that had happened, that the crew who'd tolerated her obsessive safety drills had been through their own horror, made Melissa feel cold inside.
But she couldn't quite believe that that was the news they had gathered her crew together for.
She couldn't put her finger on it, but the emotional tone of the building and of NASA's response was wrong for the kind of disaster Melissa was imagining.
She was still chewing over the problem when she arrived at one of the Johnson Space Center's fourth floor conference rooms nearly 30 minutes before the meeting started.
She was surprised to find that she wasn't the first one there.
Beth was sitting in the corner. The other woman's laptop sat open in front of her, but she was staring off into the distance and as Melissa came around the table, she saw that Beth's screensaver — a slideshow of images of the crew — had engaged. The image on the screen at that moment was of all six of them with the heads crammed together for an oddly angled selfie.
Mark had cajoled the crew into taking it the day before the disaster.
Melissa remembered being annoyed with Mark's insistence on the picture. It had been a tough day, trying to complete their work in strong winds. One of the rovers had required maintenance and the solar farm needed more care than usual. No-one had gotten as much done that day as they planned and they'd all been a little touchy and less welcoming of Mark's eternal good spirits.
But somehow he'd entreated and begged and whined and bribed and joked and teased and gotten them all together into a picture. They'd spent the evening afterwards having an impromptu movie night and Mark had made a point of emailing them all the picture "for posterity."
It was the last picture they had taken as a crew.
It was the last picture anyone had of Mark.
She tried to shake herself from the melancholy and guilt that descended whenever she thought about it, though she knew it would be a futile effort. Three years of wrestling with these feelings had taught her they weren't going away, and no matter what the NASA-assigned therapist told her, Melissa honestly didn't think they ever would.
The day she no longer felt guilty was the day she stopped accepting her responsibility as commander for the lives of her crew.
And that was a day she hoped would never come.