Beck was still standing there, the hot packet of coffee hung from his fingertips, still steaming, as he tried to make sense of what was happening. Mark, who was mere seconds out of what had looked like a full-blown panic attack, shoved back from the SysOp console in frustration, and Alex swooped in to take his place.

Beck put a hand on Mark's shoulder, and was surprised when he stood up, and retreated a few paces to the short passageway that led to the flight deck.

"You okay?" he asked, though he wasn't, and it was a stupid question and they both knew it. However, the ship's communications was dying or dead and this was simply not the time for anything past some basic reassurance.

What the hell is going on?

He followed Mark out to the inner corridor, even as Martinez and Vogel were rapidly coming to the same conclusion that Mark had.

"It's just dead," Mark said, disbelievingly, ignoring his earlier question. "I've never seen it act like that." He shook his head. NASA had drilled them on every possibility, but they'd apparently missed this one.

"Not even in a training module," Chris agreed, and a thought occurred to him, even as Mark was apparently having the same idea.

Mark glanced at him, and Chris turned on his heel, nodding, nearly certain of what Mark was going to suggest.

"Commander," he tapped his headset when she made two clicks to indicate that she had received the message, but was too busy to reply. "Should I suit up?"

Mark had already reached Airlock 2, and was readying Beck's EVA suit, when the reply came from Commander Lewis, to "stand by."

"I don't think there's really anything else we can do," Mark observed, as he stood alongside

Beck gave a tense nod, though he felt, practically speaking, that an EVA was pretty unlikely to solve the problem, either. If the entire com system had just vanished and died, as he and Mark had guessed, then… he didn't enjoy thinking about what the likely causes of that could be.

Equipment failure, something on a large scale? Hermes had redundant communications equipment, though, and the different backup systems weren't even located in the same place on the outer hull.

Even a direct hit from a decent-sized meteor shouldn't have been able to knock out all of their systems. Not all of them at the same time. It made zero sense.

"If it's been destroyed," Chris was thinking out loud, "Could we make a replacement, maybe?"

Mark shrugged. "We have some of the components, sure. We could build another one that could talk to DSOC, something similar. Would take some time. But if the existing ones don't work, I don't know why another one would." He trailed off for a moment, thinking. "I didn't feel anything, and I didn't hear anything hit the hull. Nothing showed up in the-" He cut himself off, evidently having some sort of silent argument with himself.

Chris glanced out the small porthole window on the door to Airlock 2.

"Is this survivable?" he asked Mark, not sure if he really wanted to know the answer. "No comms at all, can we even make it back?"

"Fuck if I know," he replied, not even apologizing for cursing, "I don't know. Maybe. If nothing else goes wrong. Sure. Maybe."

"Things just keep going wrong though-" He managed to not say, "without her" out loud, but it hung in the air anyway, between the two crew members who had taken Beth's loss the hardest.

He hadn't meant to say anything so gloomy aloud, but it had just slipped out. He glanced at Mark. His eyes were closed, and he pinched the bridge of his nose, exhaling. He'd been so caught up in this latest disaster that he'd almost forgotten, but there it was again.

"You had a panic attack, didn't you?" he said, trying to think about something else. Had it really only been a few moments ago? "What happened, there?"

Mark didn't reply right away, but in recent weeks, Chris had become more familiar with Mark's thought process. Their friendship had always been steady, but it had solidified in their grief. Mark wasn't ignoring him, he was just taking his time, as he tended to do when he was accessing anything emotional.

"It was the coffee," Mark replied finally, gesturing to the packet that Beck was still holding.

"The coffee?"

"Yeah, it was stupid. I guess I kind of associated it with her."

"Ah. That makes sense. How are you feeling now?"

"About to have a panic attack," he joked wearily.

"Here, have some coffee," he joked in return, holding out the packet.

"Yeah, that'll help," Mark chuckled, shaking his head.

Chris looked down at the coffee, as he passed it from hand to hand, watching the black liquid swirling. It was strange, the sensation that suddenly swept over him along with the steam. He could almost feel her, as though Beth was standing next right to him.

It was probably just a deep-brain connection, he reasoned, between the smell and sight of her favorite beverage, and the woman herself.

Still, the feeling lingered, a warm little sensation, a little less tension in his shoulders, and Chris couldn't help but wonder, just for a minute, whether his sensory system was playing tricks on him, or if he was going crazy.

"You know Mark, yeah… I get the connection," he admitted. "Hit me just now. I mean, it still hurts, but…"

Mark took the packet of coffee, unlocked the valve on top and took a sip.

"To Beth," he said, with a half-smile.

"To Beth," Chris agreed, and he took a sip too.

Then, the lights flickered and died.

"The fuck is wrong with this ship!"

Chris hadn't even managed to formulate a reply before the lights were back on again, and a few moments later, Commander Lewis appeared in the doorway to the access portal.

"It's not just the comms," she was saying to Mark. "It's the whole ship."

"No EVA, then," he commented, leaning over to latch the suit down.

She shook her head briefly, as she motioned for Mark to come back to the flight deck with her.

"Is it coming back online?" he asked, not sounding hopeful at whatever was visible on the screen.

"No, this looks like a problem with the firmware," she replied. "Maybe? What even is that? Watney? Have you ever seen anything like this?"

"A firmware problem?" he repeated, incredulous.

When Chris eased around the corner, so as not to crowd the crew members in front the flight deck, Mark was already seated at the console. All of the embedded screens had shifted to grayscale, with a row of random-looking characters scrolling along the left margin, outlined in white.

"What the hell?" Mark said softly, as the crew tried to make sense of what they were seeing.

The rest of the crew stood silently, until Martinez finally ventured a guess that surprised them all..

"Did we get hacked?"

Lewis raised her eyebrows at that. It seemed like a ridiculous question, but Chris could see immediately that it had a certain ring of truth, in comparison to any of the other theories they'd discussed.

"The screens went black for a second, and then this showed up," Lewis gestured to the scrolling alphanumerics. "and now everything is hard locked."

Hab Log

I write these to myself these days, since I can be fairly sure nobody will ever read them, at least not for a very long time. And since I don't have a lot to do, other than sit around and feel sorry for myself, I suppose I could use this log to say my goodbyes to my family and the crew, and maybe I will eventually. For right now, they all seem too close. The crew especially.

I dream about them all the time; usually just normal day-to-day things we would have been doing for the mission. I wake up a little surprised to find that I'm still here in the Hab. I miss everyone, but I miss the rest of the crew to a degree that kind of scares me. I've always been something of a loner, but what I wouldn't give to have any one of them here with me.

(Well, no, not really, because that would mean that they were stuck here too.) But I do wish I could talk to them. Have someone to bounce ideas off. At this point I think I've basically accepted that I'm going to live out my year, assuming the Hab holds up and nothing unfortunate happens to shorten that timeframe. But there is still the happy little idea that I cling to that maybe NASA knows what happened. Maybe they're sending a probe to help me out. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Probably not. The crew surely thought I was dead.

I have taken at least one small step to help clue them in, though. There's any number of satellites with imaging in orbit around Mars, so I rearranged the solar panels to form the letters A - L - I - V. Why no E, you ask? Well, I got lazy, and my hands were hurting from moving around the panels. And really, it gets the point across the way it is. Efficiency, right?

I'm going to be honest here, I really don't like to go out there. There's something about the airlock. I have to force myself to get into that tiny space, and maybe due to the experience of Sol 6, I have become increasingly uncomfortable both being suited up and doing EVAs.

Anyway, aside from occasionally sweeping off the solar panels and inspecting the outside of the Hab, there's not much reason for me to do many EVAs. I could spend some time digging out the rovers, but there's not much point since I'm not going anywhere. Also, my hands hurt just thinking about having to use that fairing as a shovel again.

The delamination continues to heal, slowly. My hands look pretty ugly and probably will for a long time until the nails grow back. But they don't hurt very much anymore. There's not really a lot for me to do, and that helps with the healing.

Speaking of which, there is really NOT a lot for me to do, besides write in this log and lay around listening to the Beatles and re-reading Agatha Christie books which I think might be making me a little bit paranoid. All of the deaths seem to take place in enclosed places like trains, airplanes, and ships.

I suppose the crew might have left other media here since they had to evacuate so quickly, but I've not been able to bring myself to go through their things yet. Their bunks are still made up and ready for their return, and it just seems wrong somehow to acknowledge that they're not coming back. I'm alone, and it's going to stay that way.

A project of some sort would be good, though. Something to keep me busy and keep my mind from being too focused on the big problems that I can't solve. Like the satellite dish. As I mentioned before, the dish itself wasn't damaged in the storm, it was the coupling that held it to the Hab that broke open. Then the coupling got destroyed in my repair attempt.

Now I'm starting to wonder about it again. Is there ANY other way? Maybe it's all the formulaic Agatha Christie books, but the satellite dish does seem like a mystery that needs to be solved.

I did manage to dig it up and transport it back to the Hab. If I hadn't been trapped underneath the thing, it would have been lost under the dunes for sure. I haven't been able to come up with any other alternatives for the ruined coupling device that might keep the dish pointed the right direction, short of holding it there in midair myself.

I'm an idiot.

Okay, I know what I'm going to do. Thanks, Mr. Poirot.

I'll build up the sand to position the dish! I'll use the sand I get from digging out the rovers! Why didn't I think of it before? There is an older satellite here in areosynchronous orbit that I can aim the dish at, and then…

Then what?

That satellite wasn't designed to talk to Hermes.

Well.

It might be more accurate to say that Hermes wasn't designed to talk to that satellite.

But I could fix that.

I'll have to send out a firmware patch, one that doesn't currently exist, splice together some cables, and do a whole hell of a lot of digging, but I might just have a workable plan here.

Looks like I've got myself a project.

"Firmware updated?" Martinez sounded skeptical, but it couldn't be denied that the console now seemed to have returned to a normal state.

"Raise CAPCOM," Commander Lewis said, as the outbound signal lit up and it was clear that the connection was being restored.

"There's no way," Mark was saying what they were all thinking at this point, "that CAPCOM or anyone else at NASA would have pushed a firmware update on us like this without telling us first."

Martinez nodded in agreement, and then his mouth fell open as a new incoming communication window opened itself, neatly dragged itself over several screens to the console where the Commander sat, and started typing. He pointed at it mutely, as the rest of the crew stared.

[Johanssen: Hello Commander.]

The usually unflappable Lewis blinked and shook her head in disbelief, fingers poised above the console keyboard input, obviously at a total loss.

Finally, she glanced at Martinez, who was updating CAPCOM on the recent events, and she decided to reply.

[Lewis: Your joke is in very poor taste.]

Almost no time elapsed at all before they could see that an answer was being typed in return. Beck unknowingly grabbed Mark's forearm, clutching it almost to the point of pain.

[Johanssen: Not a joke, Commander. I survived on Sol 6, and it's taken me this long to get back into contact with you because I had to repair the dish.

Lewis put her hands over her face.

"I left her behind," she said, eyes wide and sorrowful.