A LITTLE BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS" :

Suddenly remembering that we weren’t alone, I turned my head in every direction around the bridge, only to find that we were alone after all.

“I wonder where Dick and Courtney have disappeared to.”

“They’ve probably gone off in search of a computer to play with. I hope they find one. That would keep them busy and out of our hair.”

“Aw, don’t you like them anymore?”

“I never really did, and I know for damn sure you don’t. I can’t imagine why you wanted him along on this trip.”

“It was a logical necessity, actually! Believe me, if I knew half as much about computers and astronavigation as he does, I would have happily left him behind on Mars with Nick, but as I don’t, we need him.”

“Yes, and I suppose when he’s no longer necessary and he pisses you off you’ll just shoot him and throw him out of an airlock. I saw the gun in your carryall.”

“That was Nick’s idea, and it wasn’t for Dick. It was in case of a mutiny by the crew of the ISS!”

“We are flying halfway across the galaxy to save them from certain death—why would they mutiny and become a threat to us?”

“In Nick’s words, they had front row seats to witness mankind destroy themselves and their planet and then had to come to terms with the inevitable fact that without support or salvation, neither of which were likely, they would soon be joining the rest of mankind. I’m not sure my sanity could withstand all that, and as Nick also pointed out we don’t know these people. I am pretty sure Nick is wrong, and there won’t be any problems at all, but I am ashamed to admit that I do feel better about the situation knowing that that gun is in my carryall.”

“Well would you do me a favor? Leave it in your carryall, shove it in the bottom of one of the bedroom closets, and don’t let anybody know you’ve got it.”

“I have no intention of letting anybody know I’ve got it, believe me! I’ll go and hide it after I contact Vladimir and let him know we’re on our way.”

“No, I’ll go do it while you talk to Vladimir,” she answered.

I put on a headset and opened the communication channel to the space station. “This is Drew calling the ISS. Over.” I waited for a short time.

“Hello, Drew, Vladimir here. It’s good to hear your voice once more. How are things going? Over.”

“Hello, Vladimir, things are going pretty well so far, we launched about an hour ago and are rapidly heading your way. Over.”

“That is very good news, Drew. All our bags are packed, and we’re ready to go. I am very much looking forward to meeting you. We all are. Over.”

“I fear you will be very disappointed when you do, but you should have that opportunity in two and a half weeks, which is our best guess ETA at the moment. Listen, I’d better

sign off now and twiddle some knobs, push some buttons, and do other pilot things. I’ll call you again soon as we get closer and give you a more definite ETA. Over.”

“Not a problem, we’ll be awaiting your call. Will talk to you again soon. Over and out.”

“No worries. Over and out.”

“That was an abrupt end to the conversation. What knobs do you have to twiddle with such an urgent need?” Mel asked as she walked back onto the bridge.

“I urgently need to powder my knob—I mean nose,”

I said as I put the headphones down and left the bridge rather hurriedly. When I returned to the bridge, I saw Mel standing at the control panels and staring out into space. I walked up beside her and put my arm around her shoulders. “You certainly can’t complain about the view. There’s plenty of stars to gaze at.”

“Yes there is, but I wasn’t really looking at them. I was pondering what you said earlier about the space station crew having to watch the Earth die right in front of their eyes and how it may have affected them. I was wondering how it will affect us when we see our dead and blackened home planet as close as that, as we surely will.”

“It certainly won’t be a pretty sight, I must admit. It is, however

YET A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

Melissa interrupted my reverie. “What are you grinning at?”

I glanced at her.

“Am I grinning?”

“Like a Cheshire cat!”

I laughed, put my arm around her and hugged her.

“I was just thinking how much I’ve missed flying. I know, after spending six months flying to Mars you would think I’d be well and truly sick of it, but I’m not. Besides, that long flight also had many memorable moments, as I recall.” Then I wiggled my eyebrows at her and said, “I’ve been grounded for two and a half months, more or less, and that is the longest time I have spent on the ground since I was nineteen years old. Now here I am, blazing through space at the helm of a hot-rod alien spacecraft on my way back to Earth to rescue six stranded astronauts and take them back to Mars, with a beautiful and sexy woman at my side, and I am loving every second of it! I’ve certainly come a long way”—I chuckled—“from being a Tasmanian sheep farmer!”

Mel laughed and hugged me,

“How did you become a sheep farmer anyway?”

“I was born as one, but I was also born to fly. My parents owned a sheep farm; it was a good farm, but it didn’t make enough for them to be able to hire farmhands to help Dad, so when I was old enough to help I was the unpaid farmhand. Every day when I got home from school, and all day on school holidays and weekends, I spent most of my time working on the farm. Then one day I went to an air show at the Sale Air Base in Victoria. My best mate and I had saved our pocket money for a very long time to pay for that trip. I had always loved the idea of flying, but after seeing the jet fighters being put through their paces that day I marched straight into the recruitment office and signed up for a three-year hitch. I’ve been flying ever since.”

“How did your parents get by without your help after you signed up?”

“I knew a couple of blokes who were two years below me at my old high school who wanted part-time work. I introduced them to Dad, and he hired them. The farm went from strength to strength after that; they loved the place and the work, and my Dad wound up employing them full time toward the end.”

“What do you mean toward the end?”

“My mother passed away six years ago, and Dad died almost five months later. I’ve been told that it isn’t that uncommon for a surviving member of a close couple to pass away within six to eight months of the other. I know Dad was devastated by Mum’s death, so much so that I extended my leave by another three weeks to keep him company and help him around the farm.”

“What happened to the farm after he passed away?”

“I sold it to the two farmhands who were working on it; they loved the place as much as Dad did, but they didn’t have the finances to pay me up front, so I gave them a mortgage over it when I went home for Dad’s funeral. That was the last time I ever went home.”

I looked down at Melissa.

“Guess I’ll never see any of that money now.”

I received an elbow strike to the ribs from her, but it was relatively gentle.

“Drew, your humor can be quite black and distasteful at times,” she said.

“We each deal with tragedy in our own personal way. Making jokes, however inappropriate they may be, is how I deal with it.”

SOME MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

. I told the ship to open the intercom channel and told the crew that we were ready to fly. As they entered the bridge, I commanded the ship to start its engines, which it did immediately.

I gave the command to rise one meter, retract and lock the landing gear, and proceed down the taxiway and out the hangar doors. As we passed under the staging room windows, I snapped to attention and saluted Nick. He returned my salute and, after first checking to make sure that Sammy wasn’t watching, flipped me the bird. Without checking to see if Mel was watching, I returned the gesture just before we passed out of his visual, and I received an elbow jab to the ribs from Melissa for my mistake. I suspected Nick found it very amusing. We passed through the hangar doors into Mars’s atmosphere, and I commanded the ship to rise to 220 meters and hover. I warned the crew to prepare themselves for launch, and they reacted immediately by doing absolutely nothing. I then gave the silent command: “Launch!”

We leaped off the planet and into space. I checked the rear view monitors and saw Mars shrinking in our wake as we blasted away from it. Then I looked out the bridge windows. It hadn’t been an illusion when we flew this ship around Mars yesterday. The stars were blurred due to our speed. Where have you been all my life? I thought to the ship. She was a truly remarkable machine.

ANOTHER BIT FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

There was a large staging room (terminal, you could say) on the hangar level with its own airlock to the hangar area, and therefore, direct access for the personnel and passengers to and from the starships parked in the hangar. This was of course where we had most of our meals and gatherings because it was where most of the supplies were stored and you may recall that I had named it the Spaceport Cafe. I parked the buggy behind the others and walked into that large room, which had huge bay windows on one side overlooking the hangar area where people could watch incoming and outgoing flights. I found the rest of the crew in there saying their goodbyes to the third of the crew that was remaining behind on Mars. I walked up to Sammy and said goodbye. She gave me a hug and wished me a safe journey. I turned to Nick and shook his hand. He looked directly into my eyes and said,

“Make sure you’re back in six weeks, or I’ll come looking for you.”

I laughed and replied,

“It’s a big universe. I’m sure I could find a planet big enough to hide behind. I’ll be back in five to six weeks, given fair and favorable (solar) winds.”

With a wave of my hand, I led the rest of my crew out of the room to our buggies. I followed the crew through the hangar doors and pushed the button on the dash to close the inner airlock doors as I passed through. I saw and heard the doors closing as I followed the rest of the crew to the ship. I drove the buggy into the cargo hold of the starship. There was no way that I could see to batten the buggy down, but as I knew the physical flight characteristics of the ship I wasn’t worried, I just made sure the handbrake was firmly applied. Mel and I took the elevator to the flight deck level and put our bags into the captain’s quarters. It was a large, luxurious suite with a door connecting straight to the flight deck. After dropping the bags, I walked through the connecting door onto the bridge and put on a headset. The ship came to life. I told it to retract the ramp and close, lock, and seal the outer hull door. I could hear by the electrical whines, buzzes, and thumps that the ship had complied with my commands.

YET STILL MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

I still firmly believed in the arguments I had used to Nick against the necessity of carrying a firearm to rescue these people from the ISS, Still, with deep feelings of self-disgust and shame, I rose to my feet, grabbed the bullets out of the dresser, reloaded the gun, and put it back in my bag. I finished my coffee, grabbed my bags, threw them into the back of the buggy, and drove through the city to the hangar.

AND SOME MORE FROM 'REACH FOR MARS' :

I watched him walk down the drive and turn toward his house before I went to the bag, and removed the holster. I took out the gun and removed its magazine. Then I thumbed the rounds out of it, pulled back the slide action to eject the live round from the chamber, and put the bullets in a drawer in the dining room cabinet. I slammed the empty magazine back into the gun, returned the gun to its holster, and put it back in my bag.

I made myself a cup of coffee and contemplated the mission I was about to attempt. This led me to think about my conversation with Nick earlier. He did have a point: I didn’t know any of the people I was about to fly halfway across the solar system to pick up and transport back to Mars. I had no idea what psychological pressures they had had to endure or how those pressures may have affected their powers of reasoning. True, our crew had also witnessed the rampant and irrational destruction of our home planet and our people—and we weren’t homicidal maniacs. But then we had witnessed it all from far out in space, and on a television monitor, so the impact would have been considerably less than watching it all happening just below you through the windows of the space station.

There was also another consideration to ponder: the slow but relentlessly growing realization on the part of the space station crew that they were doomed to die themselves, slowly but surely and no doubt horribly, when their remaining supplies were exhausted. There would be no hope of help or rescue from Earth or anywhere else in the universe, so they had undoubtedly had to face the fact that they were alone in a sardine can for the rest of their very short lives. They would have been carrying these thoughts with them for a very long time, until a chance radio transmission from them reached across the void of space and was intercepted and answered from an extremely unexpected corner of the universe. Mars! I could only imagine (but didn’t want to) the extreme rollercoaster ride of emotions and thoughts they had endured to this point and how adversely it surely would have affected them.

HERE'S SOME MORE FROM 'REACH FOR MARS' :

I was busy packing the next morning when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Nick standing there with a bag in his hand, I turned and walked into the lounge room with a jerk of my head and said over my shoulder as I went,

“Don’t tell me you want to come along as well or has Sammy finally given you your marching orders—or both.”

When we arrived in the room, I turned to face him as he put the bag on the side table, unzipped it, and pulled a Colt .45 Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol from it.

“Do me a favor and take this with you,” Nick said.

“In God’s name, why, Nicholas? I’m flying there to save them, not exterminate them!”

“You don’t know these people. They had front row seats when the human race decided to destroy each other in an orgasm of fire. They may have become mentally unhinged by the ordeal! I’m pretty sure I would have been.”

“Mate, you’ve always been mentally unhinged. Do you have any idea what would happen if you fired a gun in an oxygen-rich environment such as the inside of a spaceship? The whole damn thing would probably explode! Even if it didn’t, the bullet piercing the hull would cause a massive decompression, which would cause the ship to implode, and I wouldn’t want to be on that ship when either, or both, of those things happened.”

“Just humor me and put it in your bag. I would feel happier if you did. If you don’t have to use it, well and good. But if you do, aim very carefully,” he advised.

“Yeah all right, but I don’t see any of them attacking the people who are saving them from certain death,” I insisted.

“Good, I feel a lot happier about it. Not that I give a rat’s ass about your sorry butt, but if the rest of the crew got murdered, Sammy and I would have to do all the work around here! You don’t do much around here anyway.”

“Screw you and the ship you flew in on, Nick!”

Nick and I had a talent for adjusting derogatory and insulting epithets to suit our circumstances.

“ That’s spaceship, you idiot. See you at the staging area in three hours,” he said over his shoulder as he left, chuckling to himself.

A LITTLE MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

“Yes as a matter of fact I think I do. While you were flying the starship around the planet I located the engine room and had a look inside. The engine is very similar to the Torus engine on the shipwreck and so I wouldn’t worry about running out of fuel. I also have a question for you, Drew.” Dick said. “Would it be OK if Courtney came along with us?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nick flash his smartass, triumphant grin at me, which I pretended not to see. Then he chimed in,

“Sure, Dick! I don’t see any problem with that, do you Drew? After all, you’re taking Mel with you! It’ll be a nice holiday for you all!” Then he broke into song,

“We’re all going on a summer holiday, no more worries for a week or two…”

At least the rest of the crew chimed in with me when I exclaimed,

“Shut up, Nick!”

He tried to look crestfallen, but that look is very difficult to pull off convincingly when you’re chuckling to yourself and writhing about in your chair.

ALRIGHT, JUST A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

The girls came down the stairs and joined us, so pilot talk was suspended. After I made them drinks and topped up Nick’s and mine, I was about to sit down when there was another knock at the door.

“Who the hell could that be?” I said.

I opened the door to see Dick and Courtney on the doorstep.

“Hi, guys, come on in!”

After drinks were distributed and pleasantries exchanged, Dick (typically) got straight to the point. “I’ve updated the flight plan and downloaded it onto all the starships nav computers. I reset the frequency on the starship’s R/Ts to our frequency as well,” he said.

“Well done, Dick. When do we launch then?”

“Tomorrow afternoon would be perfect. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the updated flight time as well. We will arrive in Earth’s orbit sixteen days after launch and arrive back on Mars in a further twenty days. Add, say, two days for transferring the crew and their luggage on board.”

“You’re joking, mate! Five weeks to fly to Earth and back? You said it would take nine months in the Albatross! How fast is that starship?”

“I don’t know; their systems of measurement are different from ours, but obviously it’s a damn sight faster than our ship! I will say, however, that it may not be using its top speed to reach Earth and return to Mars. We could have traveled to Mars at a much greater speed than we did in the Albatross if we’d wanted to, but then, paradoxically, it would have taken longer for us to land on Mars. It’s all to do with astrophysics, theory of relativity, and other such technical stuff that I won’t bother to bore you with. If Nick is right in his assumption that the Martian crafts are in fact starships, which I happen to agree with, then they are capable of far greater speeds when traveling to other star systems. The distance to Earth from here is not that great a distance relative to that, so the speed is adjusted accordingly. Suffice it to say that they are bloody fast ships! I doubt she’ll get much above idle in the whole trip. I dare say that now the destination co-ordinates have been entered into the ship’s computers, it will take you there as fast as possible if you think fucking fast when your wearing the control headphones.”

“Well then, it’s decided. We launch tomorrow afternoon. Be on board at fourteen hundred hours and we’ll launch whenever we feel like it. Do you have any idea what the propulsion system of the starship is Dick?”

JUST A LITTLE MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

“Enchantingly charming, aren’t I?”

“The jury is still out on that, but I don’t like your chances. So I can go with you?”

“Sure, why not? Go pack your bag and a picnic lunch. I’ll clear it with Nick tomorrow.”

“You can clear it with him tonight. I’ve invited them over for drinks. They should be here any minute.”

She jumped up and left to go pack her bag…and, perhaps, a picnic lunch. I went into the kitchen and grabbed my dinner, which I was just finishing when there was a knock at the front door. I went and opened it to let Nick and Sammy in with a welcoming,

“Nick, so it’s you again. I swear the property prices in this street have plummeted since you moved in. Hi, Sammy, how are you?”

“Fine thanks, Drew. Where’s Mel?”

“She’s upstairs, go on up.”

Nick followed me into the lounge area and sat in one of the armchairs as he handed me a bottle of rum. I went to get glasses as he asked,

“So, how was Mel when you got in? Not happy?”

“No, she wasn’t, but she’s OK now,” I answered.

“How did you manage to keep your hide untanned and alive?”

“I said she could go with me.”

“Oh, that’s crafty and clever. I’ve taught you well, Grasshopper! Thanks for that by the way; it reduces the odds significantly,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Now I’m only going to be outnumbered two to one. This city is big, but it isn’t big enough to hide from three nagging women,” he said in a whisper with his eyes fixed on the staircase. “Now if only Dick would take Courtney with him, Sammy and I would have the city to ourselves.”

“Now hang on just a cotton-picking minute! That means I’ll be carting most of the crew around in space with me and then the space station crew as well on the way back. And God knows how many women they have in their crew.”

“Yeah, my heart is bleeding for you. Has Dick worked out the updated flight plan yet?”

“Not yet. He was doing that when I dropped into the control center on my way home.”

“I would have thought he’d be doing that on the starship.”

“So did I, but he reckons the main computers are far more powerful and faster. He may be onto something there; the main computers should have the performance stats of the starships and use that data when calculating the flight times there and back.”

“How is he going to load the final plan onto the right starship’s nav computer?”

“He’s going to tell the main computer to download it onto all the starships’ nav computers.”

A BIT MORE FROM 'REACH FOR MARS,'

I returned to my buggy and climbed in as I looked at my watch and was surprised to find that it was 8:00 p.m. It had been an eventful day. I figured Melissa would be at home by now, so I pointed the Buggy in that direction. I pulled into the driveway and parked, walked in the front door, and heard banging and clattering noises coming from the kitchen. This worried me a little, as there were a lot of sharp knives in there.

“Drew, is that you?” Mel called out.

“No, I’m just your friendly neighborhood Martian burglar—don’t mind me, I won’t be long. You don’t have a lot worth stealing.”

She came into the hallway, thankfully not carrying any sharp knives, and gave me a hug and a kiss. Then she said over her shoulder as she went back to the kitchen,

“Make me a drink, please. I’ll be back in a minute.”

So I made her a drink, and she was back in a minute.

“Sorry, it may be a little strong on the rum bit,” I said as she sat down and tasted it.

“No, it’s OK. Now, I have a bone to pick with you.”

“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t discuss this mission with you first, but it all happened so fast that I didn’t get a chance.”

“Yeah, I understand that, but were you going to ask me to come with you?”

“You want to come with me?”

“I’d like to be asked!”

“I think, in the overall scheme of the conversation, I sort of just did.”

“What, just like that? No macho, fighter-jock speeches about the danger involved and how you wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the mission at hand unless you knew that I was safely back here?”

“No. I know you couldn’t live without me if something were to happen to me on this mission, so I may as well take you with me.”

“How romantic you are, as usual,” she said with a smirk.

AND SOME MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

Back on Mars… with me,

After I signed off, I shut down every system on the ship except the two-way R/T, and then I shut off all the lights as I left the Albatross and jumped into a buggy to go in search of Melissa and Richard. I drove over to the control center, as it occurred to me that I would most likely find Richard where all the computers were. I found as I walked into level four that I had guessed right when I saw him sitting in his chair surrounded by flashing computer screens. I walked up and stood beside his chair.

“Greetings, Richard, what are you up to?”

“I’m recalculating the flight plan for the rescue mission so that I can load it onto the starship’s navigation computer,” he answered.

“Shouldn’t you be doing that on board the actual starship?”

“These computers are far faster and more powerful than the shipboard computers; they also know the performance specifications of the starships, so they will formulate that into their calculations. They should be able to give me the top speed of the craft, the time to Earth’s orbit, and the time for return. Once the computer has calculated the updated flight plan, I will tell it to download the plan onto the starship’s computer.”

“How do you know this computer will download it onto the right starship’s computer?”

“I’m going to tell the computer to download the flight plan onto all of them,” he answered.

“OK, fair enough. Could you also set the starship’s radio on our frequency so I can communicate with the ISS and the city during the rescue flight?”

“Yes, I will do that as soon as I’m finished with this.”

“Great, thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Hey, Drew, when are we going to launch?”

“Ask the computer. Till tomorrow then.”

SOME MORE FROM 'REACH FOR MARS' :

“They estimated two months if they were flying the Albatross, but it turns out that they won’t be flying the Albatross. They will be flying a more powerful, technologically superior alien spacecraft they found parked on Mars and learned how to fly. They don’t know the cruising speed of the craft, but Drew told me they wouldn’t be surprised if they were in Earth’s orbit to pick us up in as little time as a month.”

I then sat down with a coffee. The rest of the crew took it to mean that I had finished speaking, and all of them started talking at once. I sat quietly and listened to them. I could not have asked for, or expected, a better reaction from my crew. For the first time since the Nuclear holocaust, I heard tones of excitement, hope, and even optimism in their voices as they spoke. I was truly grateful for that; they were a good crew and they had all become close friends during our time aboard the space station. I marveled at the fact that a small crew we had never met could make such an uplifting difference so quickly to my crew, simply by offering and extending a helping hand across millions of kilometers of space. When I had finished my coffee I stood up and leaned forward to rest on the table with my hands. The crew fell quiet and waited for me to speak. I straightened and started pacing again.

“We will need a twenty-four-hour radio watch in place immediately for when the Albatross calls again. I will stand the first watch; Yelena will spell me in four hours’ time. By then I will have worked out the rest of the schedule and will let the rest of you know when your shifts will take place. In the mean time, you’d better start packing your bags and any of the supplies and other sundries you think we should take with us. This is a full space station evacuation—you all know the drill.”

They quickly left the room to start packing, except Yelena, who remained behind and put her arms around me and hugged me. “I cannot believe it; how on earth did you arrange it?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it; it was Drew who came up with the idea and pushed for it.”

“What is he like, this Drew?”

“He seems very capable; I’ll bet a pound to a pinch of salt that he was the one who convinced the rest of the Mars crew that a rescue attempt was worth the risk and insisted that he lead it. I’ll bet a year’s salary that he’s the commander of the Mars crew. He is definitely a man who is used to getting his own way.”

“Hmm! I think I know someone like that,” Yelena teased.

I laughed and kissed her,

“Go get some sleep, my love. I’ll see you in four hours.”

I then headed back to the radio room.

HERE'S A LITTLE MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

I suppose that  I will never know how my previous radio transmission had reached Mars. The ISS’s R/T was normally only powerful enough to communicate with Earth or maybe as far as the moon in the right conditions. To reach Mars would have been impossible, I would have thought, until it happened! I actually wasn’t even sending a message to the Albatross, in fact. Although I knew the Earth and our fellow humans were finished, I still tried to raise Flight Control on the radio from time to time. It was the last such message that Albatross had intercepted and replied to. I had sat there waiting for a reply for fifteen minutes—as I always did—when I received one from a totally unexpected source. A glimmer of hope appeared on my horizon until Drew told me that they had touched down on Mars months ago. That glimmer of hope was suddenly snuffed out like a weak and sputtering candle in a hurricane…until Drew’s last message had come through. What a wonderful surprise—I could scarcely believe it. They were going to risk their lives on a foolhardy, extremely dangerous journey in which Drew and a crewmate would pick us all up and take us back with them to Mars. And in an alien ship they had found on Mars, no less! If Drew could pull this off he would be giving my crew a chance at life and a future, instead of dying in six months time in a tin can orbiting around a dead planet in the dark coldness of space. I fully realized how hard a life it would be fighting for survival on a hostile and alien planet, but I had never shied away from a difficult task, and after all, this was a chance to live. I silently wished Drew and his crew Godspeed and the best of luck. I thought of actually transmitting this message but knew that Drew wouldn’t hear it, as he would be busily preparing for the mission. I then suddenly realized that I needed to advise the rest of the crew of the latest developments. I hadn’t told the crew of my radio contact with Drew on board the Albatross yet as I didn’t want to raise their hopes only to have them dashed. Now seemed like a pretty good time to let them know so I switched the radio to the ship’s intercom channel and then looked around for the mike before realizing that I was still holding it.

“Attention all crew, please meet me in the common room as soon as possible. I have great news.”

I then hung up the mike and rose to leave, pausing long enough to switch the radio back to two-way R/T communications before heading to the common room.

I found that the rest of the crew had already assembled and they looked up at me expectantly as I walked into the room. I started pacing back and forth as I spoke.

(Drew and Nick would be very surprised when they met Vladimir because he possessed many of the qualities and personality traits of their old friend Holly.)

“Thank you for being so prompt. In the last twelve hours I have been in radio communications with a member of the Albatross crew on Mars, a man by the name of Drew.”

I paused as the sound of a huge, communal intake of breath filled the small room; then I held up my hand to still the fusillade of questions being fired at me by the crew. I went on to tell them of the series of occurrences that had led to that amazing contact.

“The Albatross landed on Mars two and a half months ago,”—the crew’s previous communal intake of breath was now expelled as a communal groan—“but Drew has consulted with the rest of his crew and they have agreed to mount a rescue mission to pick us up and take us back to their base on Mars.”

I raised my hand once more to silence the crew so I could finish telling them all of it.

“Drew and another crew member will be launching from Mars in the next two days and heading our way.”

I paused to allow a question from Yelena. “How long will it take them to reach us?” she asked. 

A TAD MORE:

On board the International Space Station… with Vladimir,

I sat in the radio operator’s chair deep in  thought for quite a while after Drew had signed off. I was still shocked by all that had happened in the last six months, as was the rest of the crew of the ISS. We had watched in helpless horror as our home planet was destroyed beneath us. We had had front row seats for that holocaust. We all had feared and subconsciously known that the conflagration below us would have wiped out most, if not all living creatures down there. Some of the mushroom clouds bursting up from the surface below seemed would engulf us. We knew in our hearts that if there were any survivors of the explosions and exposure to the huge doses of radiation, they would have perished from the nuclear winter that followed, caused by the radiation clouds that covered the Earth for so many months afterward, preventing the sun’s life-giving rays from reaching the Earth’s surface. When the clouds finally started to dissipate gradually as the radioactive dust sank back to the Earth, our fears were confirmed by the sight of the charred and blackened surface of the planet we once called home. The whole crew was totally devastated by it all, but it grew worse as the realization sank in that we were stranded in an orbit around a dead planet until we died, which would occur in the very near future. With no hope of resupply or rescue and nothing we could do about it, We were destined to follow our comrades on Earth in four to six months when the last of our supplies were exhausted.

I was amazed at the vagaries of fate and luck that had worked together to put in place a staggering series of events that hopefully would lead to our eventual salvation. We had all known about the launch of the Albatross, of course, as it was big news in the media for weeks before the ship actually launched. We also shared the same radio frequency with Flight Control, so on the day of the launch we watched the television coverage while listening to the actual transmissions between Flight Control and the Albatross. We actually watched from our perch in space as the Albatross blasted out of Earth’s gravity and into space on its way to Mars with all its engines at full thrust and fully lit. It was a moving and inspiring sight that moved me to radio a congratulatory, best of luck message to them. As I never received a reply, I assumed that they either never got it or were too busy to reply. We watched until the ship’s tail fire had dwindled into the distance and was lost among the stars before we went back to work.