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tension in her voice penetrated all the way down to the frigid air of the computer core. Nathan, more than anyone, understood why—and what it could mean to the mission.
    “Locking things down,” he said, already weary of Mars. “I’m on my way up.”

     

    Almacantar was a variable-profile vessel, a propulsion hull with a crew compartment that could be mated to a wide array of modules depending on her specific mission. Originally constructed as a joint venture between the United States of America and the Reformed Republic of China, she launched a mere seven years after the Chinese cast off the last vestiges of their experiment with socialism—and only two years before they formed a corporate alliance with the Japanese that would later develop into the Collective. Her designers had intended her for scientific exploration of Jupiter and its moons, a mission that brought both stunning success and unintended consequences. While sampling the upper reaches of the Jovian atmosphere, Almacantar had proved the viability of long-range gas mining—effectively turning Jupiter into a way station with enough fuel to power every human endeavor across the solar system.
    From that point, Almacantar ’s fate was sealed. She was retooled for commercial service, and spent most of the next decade making runs between Jupiter and the scattered outposts she serviced. Along the way, Directorate engineers modified her spaceframe to accommodate the latest technological upgrades and mission requirements—all of which eventually twisted her sleek form into a crude chaos of jutting shapes and improvised lines. She sported obvious welding scars from where her conventional engines had been replaced with pulse-fusion hybrid reactors and a spatial jump drive, plus all the dents and carbon scalding that resulted from so much time in spacedock. In short, Almacantar was an ugly beast—a sad shell of her former self, a relic from a time when space travel was new and mankind’s aspirations less vulgar. But to those who knew her, she was better than a good-luck charm. In Almacantar ’s entire period of service, she had never lost one member of her crew. There had been a thousand close calls and near misses, critical injuries that should have taken dozens of lives—but the ship had never returned home with fewer souls than when she departed. And for that, her officers and crew loved her.
    This was the fourth time Captain Lauren Farina had taken her out, and each time the mission had gone by the numbers; but good luck carried with it a curse, the fear that she would be the one to break Almacantar ’s winning streak. So far, Farina had stayed ahead of the game—and when she saw Mars for the first time on the main viewer, she had felt a momentary elation. They had beaten the odds once more. Now, Farina was cursing herself. She should have known better.
    The captain did her best to maintain an outward calm, projecting a casual confidence from the center seat. It was, like many facets of command, an illusion. Inside, she felt exactly the same thing as the crew—a slow dread, pulsing through her veins and making the subtle suggestion: I knew it couldn’t be this simple.
    Farina didn’t have the luxury of letting it show. That was the prerogative of the six mates and officers with her on the bridge, who eyed her apprehensively from their stations. Such was life aboard a commercial vessel: a constant state of emotional combat, played out in a tin can arena among fifty souls chasing after a paycheck. Fifty lives, all Farina’s responsibility, who expected fat compensation for assuming the rigors of this mission. That bottom line was one of only two things that held everything together. The other was the captain. Good ones learned to master all that conflict, to use it to their advantage. For now, though, Farina had to begin by keeping things under control.
    That meant working the bridge crew hard. She had ordered a lockdown of all stations, isolating