By Mike Muzzy · © 2026 Mike Muzzy. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

NINETY DAYS

Training centre, January–March 1981

On the first morning, Hale put thirteen people in a room and showed them a photograph of a pressure door.

“What is wrong with this?” he asked.

Several hands went up.

He waited.

The photograph showed a repair completed on Mars. The new metal was brighter than the old frame. Someone had marked the seal with a pencil.

“A replacement part,” said Meera Rao.

“Correct. Anything else?”

“The bolts don't match,” Burton Trouble said.

“Also correct.”

Hale put up the next photograph. It showed the same door with its inner panel removed and a technician's hand holding a measuring gauge against the seal.

“The first photograph tells you somebody repaired a door,” he said. “The second tells you whether it will hold pressure. On Mars, learn to ask for the second photograph.”

Morozov followed with a session on electrical distribution. He described the colony's original powerhouse, the new unit being commissioned and the ways a minor fault could interrupt several departments at once.

Patryk Kowalski asked detailed questions about emergency power to the spaceport. Céleste Varenne wanted to know which systems a shuttle crew could isolate without waiting for instructions from the surface. Ama Mensah asked for the orbital tracking assumptions used in the approach procedures.

Morozov was pleased.

“Good. You've already found three different ways to make my morning difficult.”

The candidates had been chosen for different reasons.

Burton understood heavy vehicles and the sort of repair that had to be made beside a road, far from a proper workshop. Meera knew water treatment. Amira Haddad's colleagues on Mars had asked for additional medical skills, while Layla Azadi's training gave the group another person able to respond when an injury could not wait. Kumiko brought communications experience. Rafael Costa understood the work of measuring and assessing unfamiliar ground. Patryk, Céleste and Ama brought the flight and navigation expertise on which every transfer depended.

Serena's experience in legal offices and administration made her useful long before anyone left Earth. She noticed contradictory instructions in the training paperwork and insisted that the organisers resolve them. Daniel examined the emergency chain of command, asked who held authority when the flight crew and civilian specialists disagreed, and challenged an exercise that had no written procedure for recording decisions. Tobias and Anja examined the habitat drawings together. Tobias noticed that a proposed storage change would make the shared corridor unpleasant to use; Anja found that the revised partition also interfered with a service access panel. They drew a third arrangement that preserved both the maintenance clearance and the space people needed to pass each other.

Their qualifications explained why they had been invited.

The following ninety days would test whether they could live and work together.

They trained in a pressurised habitat mock-up with a narrow corridor, shared wash facilities and a galley designed for more people than could comfortably stand in it. At first, the instructors controlled every hour. Later they deliberately gave the candidates overlapping assignments and insufficient time to complete them all.

During one exercise, the water-recovery unit developed a simulated fault just as the habitat lost its main electrical supply.

Meera went directly to the water system. Daniel checked the emergency instructions and established who was responsible for each decision. Serena took the task board, clarified the assignments and asked who was free to help.

Burton offered to carry replacement equipment.

“Which equipment?” Serena asked.

“Whatever weighs the most.”

“That's not a qualification.”

“It has been useful so far.”

She handed him a sealed tool case.

The instructor announced that an airlock indicator had also failed.

Tobias checked the airlock plan and called Kumiko over to verify the link to the external panel. Anja compared the indicator circuit with the physical door arrangement and asked whether the instrument had failed or the airlock had actually changed state.

“Don't open it to find out,” Hale said from the observation booth.

“We weren't going to,” Anja replied.

“Good. You'd be surprised.”

By the end of the exercise, the group had restored simulated power, isolated the faulty indicator and kept the water system running. They had also missed two routine checks and left a tool case blocking the corridor.

Hale marked all of it.

At dinner, the thirteen argued over whose job it had been to move the case.

“Mine,” Burton said at last. “I put it there.”

The argument ended.

Confinement proved more difficult than the machinery.

Someone wanted the galley quiet after the evening shift. Someone else believed the evening shift was the only time people could talk. A misplaced notebook delayed a navigation exercise. A badly labelled food container caused a dispute that occupied half an hour and produced no agreement about whose lunch had been eaten.

Daniel and Serena generally found time to sit together, even on the busiest days. They were plainly in love, but neither stopped working when the other was assigned elsewhere. During a medical drill, Serena stayed at her station while Daniel was designated the casualty. She asked for his condition through the proper channel, then continued coordinating the exercise records and assignments.

Afterwards, one of the military observers asked whether she had found that difficult.

“Of course,” she said. “But the other twelve people still needed me to do my job.”

“No.”

“Then I passed.”

Tobias and Anja had their own habits. They met for coffee when their shifts allowed it, spread drawings across a table and sometimes argued over a detail long after everyone else had lost interest. They had won recognition for working together before the Mars programme, but neither mistook that for always agreeing. One evening Tobias wanted to continue a discussion about the layout of the civilian quarters. Anja told him she had already spent eight hours looking at walls and wanted to eat.

He put the manual away.

The psychologists watched for dependence, conflict and withdrawal. They also watched for the ordinary ways people helped one another recover from a hard day.

Not every friendship was immediate. Burton's confidence irritated those who preferred to follow the manual. Céleste had little patience for anyone who treated flight training as an adventure. Layla disliked having to explain the same instructions twice. Rafael asked so many questions that people sometimes mistook his curiosity for criticism.

Hale told them disagreement was useful if it happened early enough.

“A problem you discuss over dinner is better than a problem you discover halfway through a repair.”

In the final month, the training staff ran a continuous simulation of the transfer journey. The candidates worked rotating shifts, managed limited supplies and practised communications with a deliberate delay. Instructors inserted failures without warning.

One morning the simulated medical store showed a shortage of a drug that should have been aboard.

Layla checked the inventory. Serena compared the signed inventory with the revised issue sheet and found a discrepancy nobody had recorded. Burton searched the storage mock-up and located the container on the wrong rack, correctly sealed but incorrectly entered into the system.

“Do we get credit for finding it?” he asked.

“First we correct the record,” Serena said. “Then we find out how it got there.”

By the end of the ninety days, the instructors had a long list of faults to correct and a shorter list of people they no longer worried about.

Hale reviewed the final assessments with Morozov.

“They're not a crew yet,” Morozov said.

“No,” Hale replied. “But they know how to become one.”