Chap 7
And Ianto's still. Still. And then in a last reflexive shudder. Gasps. Gasps again. Takes in the worthless Mars atmosphere. And right when we think it's entirely over...Takes in some more. Breathes again. And again. Opens his eyes.
"I'm not dead."
The other two are watching in amazement.
"I'm not dead. It's like being at high altitude. There's not much air here. But..." Takes him a minute to catch his breath, "but...We're not gonna die."
Owen's suit alarm sound. He doesn't screw with gasping in the suit. Just opens the damn thing up and prays. Breathes. Raggedly.
"It ain't much. But it'll do." Owen gasps as he looks around, puzzled. "What the hell's going on here?"
Tosh's ALARM GOES OFF as well. Much more tentatively she removes his helmet. Breathes. "I thought we'd be dead."
"I thought we'd be dead." She repeats with awe.
They all breathe the thin Martian air for a moment.
"God, if John had only waited five more minutes. What a waste..."Ianto swallows.
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Static on the Torchwood, on the comm clears. A brief caesura then -
"Copy." Jack barks.
"Roger, Torchwood. Good to hear from you. We believe you may have suffered a proton field upset. What is your status?"
Silence. Silence. Jack struggles to maintain control. Tear runs down. Takes a deep breath.
"MEV launched. Radio contact zero. Visual shows crash site, one body, no motion. Believe entire crew to be End of Mission. Torchwood systems check at below 70 percent. Telemetry to follow." he punches a button. Starts to upload it to them. "Air purge in fire control degraded orbital path. Current orbit unstable. Thirty-two hour projected failure. Do you copy, Houston?"
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The telemetry has come in. Rhys puts it up on the common vid-screen. Ship status and all the failures are displayed. It's a disaster.
"Roger. We copy that." Rhys says sadly. He lets go of the mike. Can't help himself. "Jesus fucking God."
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*********************FLASHBACK*******************
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Dark. Someone moves along Torchwood's gantries. And emerges into and observational sphere. An icosahedral slice has been removed from one side and replaced with optical glass. A billion stars are brighter and more numerous than you've ever imagined. Ianto comes in, bumps smack into Doc. Thought he was alone.
"Sorry" Ianto says automatically.
"Lots of room." Doc smiles. He had been having a quiet conversation with his son while comms were still viable, Rhys was his only child and leaving him hurts.
They lean back against the "floor" for a moment and stare out at a billion and a half stars.
"Know the stars at all?" Doc asks forgetting the comms were still open.
"Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cetus, Lepus, Canis Minor. We're looking at what you'd see south around midnight, mid-May if we were on Earth. At about 42 degrees." Ianto grins as he points.
He's not showing off. He just really does know. Doc looks at him, surprised.
"My grandfather taught me to sail when I was a kid." Ianto smiles softly as he recalls a happier time in his life, "He made me learn the stars in case all the G.P.S. satellites fell out of the sky at once. He said anyone who put his life in the hands of anything run by batteries was a jackass."
"He sounds like quite a guy." Doc smiles back.
"He didn't like what he called the easy answer or the quick fix. He didn't want to own anything he couldn't repair himself." Ianto frowns as he looks around at the tech surrounding them, "And, oh yeah, everything automatic sooner or later fails automatically, usually during or immediately before a crisis. He had a lotta damn sayings."
Ianto runs his face, "He wouldn't've approved of this."
"Going to Mars?" Doc asks.
"No. That we killed off half the living things on Earth. That after we all but destroyed one planet with global warming, we're trying to bring another to life the same way. Kinda tricky, don't you think?" Ianto turned to face him, "He woulda said we were asking for trouble."
"It looks like we got trouble. That's why they sent us." Doc snorts with good humour. A beat. They go back to staring at the heavens.
"I don't really get it. You quit being a scientist? You went back to school to study God?" Ianto finally asks and Rhys holds his breath in the hopes his father will give an answer other than the shrug and change of subject he got when he asked the same question.
"I just realized science couldn't answer any of the really interesting questions." Doc answered, "There are values that are fundamental to an adequate apprehension of the world in which we live that can't be expressed by equations or experiments. In that, you see the hand of God.
Acknowledgment of basic values. Love, kindness, joy. Science doesn't have much use for these. Look, ugly theories are wrong. We know it by insight. Science doesn't want to accept that. We live in a moral world and have moral knowledge that tells us that love and truth are better than hatred and lies. But it's modern to think this is little more than genetic imprinting or a tacit communal cultural agreement. That's not a world I cared to live in anymore."
Doc stares back into the void. This is not the kind of conversation he's used to.
"I asked my grandfather once if God existed. He played me Brahms' Third. Then he asked me what good it was? Or was it just vibration." Ianto mutters.
"What good is beauty?" Doc tried to follow.
"He said if a man could listen to Brahms and not believe in God, he was a fool." Ianto laughed softly.
"I think I woulda liked your grandfather." Doc smiles at the stars.
"You didn't come on this trip because of science at all, did you? That's why they let you come, but you're going to Mars to prove to yourself God exists." Ianto accuses with a soft grin.
"Yup." Doc snorts and Rhys can't believe what he is hearing.
"Maybe I'll pick up a rock and it'll say so on the bottom 'Made by God.'" Doc laughs and Ianto huffs.
"Maybe God's more subtle than you are" Ianto laughs. "You think we're doing something we shouldn't, Buddy, messing with another planet?"
"If so, it's because we're supposed to find something out." Doc formulates an answer he can live with to, "Let's say we didn't. And we finished poisoning off the Earth and everyone was dead in a hundred years. Then what was the point of any of it? Music, art, beauty, love? All gone. The Greeks, the Romans, the Enlightenment, the Constitution, people dying for freedom, ideas? None of that meant anything? I'd rather go out and make a mistake than live in a world that bleak."
"No one said jack to me about the Greeks and Romans. Shit, I just came along to fix stuff." Ianto gapes with mock horror.
"Fooled ya, didn't we. It's okay. No one told the others either." Doc assures him. There's a quiet moment. They just came up to stare at the stars. Wasn't expecting all this.
"There's a reason the planets go around the stars in exactly the same way electrons go around the nucleus of the atom. It's not an accident. There's a design at the bottom of all this. God's watching over you." Doc wonders.
"I just wish I didn't think he was chuckling." Ianto answers and they both laugh heartily as Rhys closes his connection quietly, satisfied that his father had a friend up there to help him.
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Oi! SD4IANTO …. Spoiler alert …. I DID PUT IT IN! hahahahahha, wait for it babe in Chaps 11/12.