14
Conjunction
The North Polar Expedition reached the pole on October 18, 2025. After five weeks of exploring the layered terrain it returned to the Outpost. Then in early December two expeditions, each with two rangers, a portahab, and a conestoga, set out to the east and west respectively to cross Mars. The western expedition, led by Jerry McCord, completed the ramp and escaped Noctis Labyrinthus, then drove across the Tharsis Plateau toward Arsia Mons, then Amazonis Planitia. The eastern expedition, led by Érico Lopes, broke out of the chaotic terrain at the opposite extremity of the Mariner canyon system and began to cross the ancient cratered highlands of Mars, making for Isidis Planitia. After two months, each expedition had added 1,600 kilometers to the Circumnavigational Trail or Route 1, which had already been 4,000 kilometers long. The 7,200 kilometers of dirt track now stretched one third of the way around Mars.
It was almost conjunction, a traditional time to pause and reflect on their efforts, and almost the onset of the duststorm season. Because of reliable communications relays via communications satellites in orbit around Venus, the conjunction would see less disruption of contact with Earth than the previous two. Even so, it was time to re-evaluate their plans. Will called Érico, Carmen, Jerry, and Lal back to the Outpost for a few sols of discussions with him, Pavel, Madhu, Roger, Monika, and Ethel.
A sunwing bearing Érico and Carmen rode westward with the sun and touched down in the early afternoon. The sunwing with Jerry and Lal left their expedition the afternoon of the previous sol and rode eastward five time zones, landing an hour later.
“I want to see the new building,” Jerry said to Will, as they all sat in Habitat 4 to eat a late lunch, which was a late breakfast for Jerry and Lal.
“Oh? You’re demonstrating more interest in the project than I expected!”
“It’s an ambitious effort. I saw as we were landing that the windows are in.”
“Yes, in fact we pressurized the building last week with oxygen. Do you want a tour right now?”
“Sure!” Jerry and Will rose. Lal and Érico, curious, rose to join them; Pavel, proud of his achievement, went along as well. Will led them through the airlock and into a tunnel that ran southward alongside a greenhouse to the building’s closer airlock. They passed through and entered the lower level.
Daylight streamed into the great room, which was ten meters square, through three windows. It was still untidy; electrical lines were being laid across the ceiling and pipes along the wall. Electrical fixtures had dangling wires. Materials lay on the floor and debris was in piles. But Jerry was impressed anyway. He felt the wall. “It has the feeling of plaster. You all did a great job of smoothing it, too.”
“The hard part was inside the wall,” replied Pavel. “There are two sets of reinforcing rods in it, two curtains of wire mesh, and under the plastic finish you’re admiring is a stray-on plastic coating to improve pressure retention.”
“There are still leaks around the windows, too,” added Will. Each window was forty centimeters square and was encased in metal sheathing. He pointed to caulking around the edge of the sheathing. “The leaks are pretty slow now, though. This place can hold air within the pressure specifications for three sols. That’s good enough to continue the installation work without pressure suits.”
“But it’ll have to improve before we can rate it for standard use,” added Pavel. “We’ll fix the leaks gradually.”
“This will be a fantastic great room; so much bigger than anything we have now,” said Lal. “What’s back here; the kitchen?”
“Among other things,” replied Will. He led them across the space to a five by ten meter kitchen, then a work room of the same size.
They climbed the stairs to the top story. It was much less finished. A central corridor ran down the middle of the floor, with five doors on each side opening into unfinished rooms about four and a half meters square. Each had a window. “One of these will be a bathroom,” explained Pavel. “The other nine can be bedrooms or work areas for one person. With the work space downstairs, we figure the building can accommodate six people for their sleeping and work pretty well.”
“Comfortably, too,” noted Jerry. “So, when this is finished, the Outpost’s total capacity is raised to thirty.”
Will nodded. “Correct. Furthermore, we could build another building of this size more quickly, so if we need more capacity before Columbus 4 arrives, we could have it ready.”
“Ready for habitation?” asked Lal, surprised.
“Almost,” replied Will. “There would be a few tonnes of necessities that Columbus 4 would have to bring. But they could be installed in less than a month.”
“We could manage that,” agreed Jerry, nodding. “But how many people will Mars have at that point?”
“That’s a matter on the agenda, so let’s get back to Habitat 4 and start our meeting.”
They all headed back to Habitat 4, where the Great Room had been set up for their conference. Ten chairs were set in a semicircle with two cameras facing them to send their images back to Earth. Several microphones guaranteed that their audio would be received in a similar conference room in Houston, where a dozen NASA officials would sit in another semicircle ready to listen and reply. Madhu stretched out on her chair; now eight months pregnant, she was beginning to get quite uncomfortable. Ethel sat near Will with Marshall, now eleven months old, who was crawling around on the floor or cruising along the wall, pacifier in his mouth.
There was no reason to wait; the audience in Houston could always watch the Mars team on videotape. “Jerry asked how many humans will be here when Columbus 4 arrives,” Will began. “Yestersol I got advance notification from NASA. They have decided to lease space on Europe’s new Swift shuttle to launch Columbus 4’s cargo and will purchase a shuttle of their own in the next two years. This means Columbus 4’s anemic budget will stretch to cover the full original plan. Columbus 4 will include two shuttles, four ITVs, and sixteen people. If the Chinese join they’ll be able to add one or two more people. The sixteen include five couples.”
“Five?” Jerry’s eyebrows went up. “Congratulations, Will. You won.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, Jerry. It is true, however, that this represents a commitment to long-term settlement of Mars for the purpose of scientific research. It’s important to add that; we’re not talking about colonizing Mars. That’s not justified economically or by any other criterion. Maybe it will be in a few decades, but it isn’t yet.”
“How much cheaper will launching Columbus 4 be?” asked Ethel.
“They already have the Mars shuttles in orbit, undergoing testing, and the ITVs can’t be redesigned to fit into the Swift cargo bay. Those items will cost $6,000 per kilogram to put in orbit, as usual. But the other half of the mass to be launched can fit in the Swift, and it’ll cost—” Will paused so that he wouldn’t laugh “—$1,000 per kilogram.”
Several others laughed instead; it was an embarrassing difference. “So how many will we have here?” asked Carmen, getting them back to the subject at hand.
“Good question,” replied Will. “Ethel, Marshall, and I are staying; Roger, Madhu, and child are staying; Érico and Carmen are staying; Eve and Gaston signed up to stay and plan to adhere to their commitment; same for the Strogers; Lal committed to stay—”
“Shinji’s leaving,” said Roger.
“No, I talked to him yestersol and he told me he wanted to stay for a fourth cycle,” replied Will. “Jerry, you’re still planning to leave?”
Jerry nodded. “I feel torn sometimes, but I have a family on Earth.”
“We’re staying,” exclaimed Monika. “Paul and I, that is. This may come as a shock to some of you, but we’ve decided to get married.”
“Congratulations!” said Ethel, delighted.
“I’m so surprised, you could knock me over!” proclaimed Roger, startled.
“We have so many good examples of happy marriages around us, we figured we’d give it a try,” commented Monika. “The one-child family seems attractive, too, especially if the support network remains as good as it seems to be.”
“It does take a village,” agreed Ethel.
“So, that’s six couples, Lal, and Shinji; 14 so far,” said Jerry, getting them back on the topic. “And two leaving. Sixteen out of twenty-three adults accounted for.”
“I’m heading back,” said Pavel. “The building will be done, a second one will be started, and the skills will be conveyed. It was fun.”
“Rick’s going back also,” added Will. “Lisa and Karol sound interested in staying. Koyo seems to want to stay; Patrice definitely plans to leave because he has his eye on the possible French mission to Venus; Maria and Linda are planning to go back as well. So that’s seventeen staying and six leaving. That means when sixteen arrive on Columbus 4, we’ll have thirty-three, and if eighteen arrive we’ll have thirty-five.”
“We’ll need another building,” exclaimed Pavel. “No problem. We can get started on it right away, in and around other tasks, and do the heavy construction work later.”
“The heavy construction work requires rangers, and they’re all out exploring,” noted Will. “So unless they have to come back because of a dust storm, the bulk of the work will have to wait until Columbus 3 blasts off, which gives us only nine months to complete the building. Furthermore, we’ll have a crew of eleven at the Outpost to do the work if six are exploring in three vehicles. But it’s possible.”
“Definitely,” agreed Pavel.
“So, even with thirty-three to thirty-five people on Mars, the agency won’t have to fly out a habitat,” said Pavel. “That saves a lot of mass. Our greenhouse experiment needs to proceed next, before we even complete the building, because it will determine whether they have to fly out five to seven more greenhouses.”
“Yes, that has to be a priority,” agreed Will. “If we can build a greenhouse entirely out of local materials, or even if we can reduce imports by half, we save a lot of money. By the way, Heather Kimball, head of the Mars Exploration Society, told me that she has been having a lot of private conversations with Harold Lassen lately, and she’s pretty sure he’ll be able to secure permission for the MES to send their Mars dome, as they’re calling it. The decision to accept the Swift has helped. It’ll be thirty meters across and have a floor area of 700 square meters, enough to feed nine people if it were all agricultural. So our existing greenhouses plus the Mars dome will feed everyone. But the rules require redundancy, so we can’t plan on using the Mars dome except as an emergency supplement. The arriving equipment and consumables will have to be able to feed everyone if one cargo vehicle is lost; and the new risk assessment suggests the danger of losing a vehicle is one in one hundred fifty, not one in five hundred as it had been thought.”
“Really?” Jerry was surprised. “That’s quite a serious reappraisal!”
“The committee made a large number of recommendations for improving reliability, and NASA is setting a goal of tripling reliability in the next few years,” replied Will. “But it’s a wake-up call to us. We’re out at the end of a long supply line with equipment of uncertain reliability.” Will looked at his agenda. “So we know how many will be here, more or less. We need to complete the first building, build a greenhouse prototype, and start on a second building. Regarding expeditions, we’re moving into dust storm season in a few weeks. Storms can eliminate emergency rescue capacity because the high winds will prevent sunwings from landing. They can even prevent use of a shuttle. Our expeditions can proceed on nuclear power; visibility is never so low that people would have to stay inside the vehicles. But there’s the risk that rescue capacity is diminished. What’s your fancy, commanders?”
“My people want to explore,” replied Jerry.
“Same here,” agreed Érico. “But we have Shinji, so medical care is covered. Jerry’s expedition doesn’t have a doctor.”
“Could we get Eve for a few months?” asked Jerry.
Will shook his head. “Negative. The outpost is a more dangerous environment because of the construction and it has a baby, with another one on the way. We have to keep one physician here all the time.”
“But we can send a medical robot; either physician can perform basic surgery remotely with it,” noted Madhu. “And many people have basic first aid training. I don’t think emergency care is a serious issue.”
Will looked around. The others who often went on expeditions were nodding. “Okay, we’ll stay out during the dust storm season and hope no one has an accident or gets appendicitis. Mission control will let us do this; I asked.”
“That’s new,” observed Jerry.
“It is. They’re letting us set the balance of safety and exploration.”
“Can we get all the way around the Mars in the time left?” asked Lal.
“This sol is February 3,” replied Will. “Blastoff is set for September 12, with trans-Earth injection on September 19. That means the expeditions need to be back here no later than about August 31. That’s seven months. If each expedition advances nine hundred kilometers per month, they can clear 12,600 kilometers of road in seven months. Mars is 21,000 klicks in diameter, and we’ve already cleared 7,200, leaving 13,800.”
“But we can do better than thirty klicks per sol,” replied Jerry. “I think we can average forty.”
“But should we try to do this simply for the sake of doing it?” asked Roger. “If we don’t complete it before blastoff, we can complete it a month or two later. Right now there are sols we manage even fifty kilometers, but other sols we travel less, and we don’t travel at all on Sunsols.”
“And there’s the South Pole,” reminded Érico. “The best time to go there is August of this year, after the dust storm season has ended but before winter has set in.”
“How many poles can we reach?” asked Jerry. “The South Pole can always wait. No one has circumnavigated the moon yet! We can beat them.”
Will looked at Jerry. It was obvious that he wanted to try for it. “We have to remember that the return trip from half way around—about 11,000 kilometers from the Outpost—will take eleven sols of driving, or almost three sols flight in a sunwing. It’s not a drive around the corner. It’ll strain equipment. And we can’t postpone blastoff very much. We’ll need at least two rangers back here before blastoff based on safety rules.”
“And remember our roads aren’t arrow straight; they twist and turn a bit, which adds fifteen percent,” noted Roger. “Route 1 needs about 16,000 klicks of clearing.”
“So, we clear forty-five kilometers a sol, six sols a week,” replied Jerry. “That’s 270 kilometers per week and over a eleven hundred per month. In seven months that’s 7,700 kilometers per expedition, 15,400 total. That’s just about what we need if we straighten the routes. It’s possible.”
“Assuming no breakdowns,” noted Érico. “And making generous assumptions about what can be done every sol.”
“The route will have to be selected to pass over smooth terrain and avoid the most geologically interesting sites,” added Neal. “That would be unfortunate.”
“We’ll have to look into it,” replied Jerry, his voice rising a bit. “A circumnavigational Trail should be made for speed and efficiency in mind, anyway; it shouldn’t snake after every good bit of geology. But side routes can be made to the geologically interesting sites, and they don’t have to meet the quality standards that the main route is built to.”
“You’re really pushing the limits of what we can achieve,” said Will, looking at Jerry. “But I don’t mean that as a criticism. It leads to innovation, as long as we don’t compromise safety.” He looked at the others. “Whether we can complete the route before blastoff or not, should we try to push it forward continuously that long, with none of the rangers returning to the Outpost before September? The sunwings are working fine. They can survey the route, drop supplies in advance, and rotate two crew members per month between each expedition and the Outpost. We have only four or five people who can’t leave at all, so we have eighteen people who can go out.”
“Radiation exposure would not be excessive in that time,” added Roger. “But that means the eighteen people would be away from the Outpost about five months out of the next seven.”
“We could run the expeditions with five crew instead of six, if necessary,” suggested Érico. “If we did that, people would be away about four months out of seven.”
“That’s doable,” said Will. “Pavel, that means the Outpost has a total of eleven or twelve here at any time, including one physician, two mothers, and at least four full-time maintenance positions. Assuming the mothers complete the equivalent of one of the maintenance positions, that leaves us four, sometimes five people for construction. Can we finish the first building, one experimental greenhouse, and do some work on a second building in that time?”
“Yes, though we may not get much done on the second building.”
“Alright. So I think we have a plan for the next eight months: build as much of the Circumnavigational Trail as we can, all of it if possible; keep an average of eleven people out at any time; complete the building, one greenhouse, and start some work on a second building. There is one twist I have to add. We have never been able to get one of the Lifters to achieve a proper hard dock on Phobos, after seven months of trying. We probably need to fly an expedition up to Phobos next month to fiddle with it and get it properly docked, so that it can fuel up. But that means Érico’s group will have to come back here for a week to ten sols to provide ground support for the shuttle launch and landing.”
Jerry groaned. “There’s no other way?”
Will shook his head.
“Actually, there’s one thing mission control hasn’t let us try,” noted Ethel. “Lifter 2 is fully fueled, now. It could take off and Lifter 1 could dock where Lifter 2 was docked. Maybe Lifter 1 can achieve a hard dock on the other docking collar. Or failing that, maybe Lifter 1 can achieve a hard dock to Lifter 2, in which case the fuel can be transferred to Lifter 1, and Lifter 2 can dock again and fuel up again.”
“And once Lifter 1 is fueled, it doesn’t need to achieve a hard dock to anything. It could just land on Phobos and wait.” Will smiled. “I’ll ask Mission Control about that. It’ll save a lot of hassle. With a two percent chance of mission failure, I’d rather not fly two crew to Phobos if it can be avoided!”
“What about the nine months between Columbus flights?” asked Roger.
“One possibility is refining and improving Route 1, and doing further geological work along it,” suggested Jerry. “It occurs to me that we could finish Route 1 more quickly if we don’t build it to such high standards. We could also postpone a lot of the geological work until later. The road will open up a lot of territory, after all; a strip one hundred kilometers from the route will embrace over four million square kilometers of Mars. A five hundred kilometer wide strip would embrace a sixth of the planet’s entire surface area. Routes 1 and 2 together will open every major geological terrain on the planet to us. So I’d favor completing Route 1 fast, then taking our time and exploring its territory in detail.”
There was a silence, while at least some of those present thought about Jerry’s burning ambition to be the man to complete the first phase. Finally, Will said “We will be developing and improving the route for some time, and we will be exploring the area around it for some time, before and after Columbus 3 leaves. What you say makes sense in outline. I think our priorities for the nine months after Columbus 3 leaves will look like our priorities now: build buildings, clear routes, and explore. They will change if we find an incredible fossil location or a lode of gold, so we have to be flexible.”
“What we can say about the previous nine months is that the rangers are all working well and the reactors have proved a vital success,” exclaimed Jerry. “They have opened the door for all of this work. There is no reason why we can’t finish Route 1.”
Will nodded. “And on that note, let’s take a break. This entire discussion is still winging its way to Earth via Venus. Mission control’s panel at the other end needs half an hour to listen, digest our ideas, and offer their response. So let’s stretch, get another cup of coffee, or brainstorm privately.”
Will rose and stretched. They had been deliberating nearly an hour. Marshall had sensed that his daddy was busy and had been pretty good at staying away, but now he was delighted to see that Will was done. Everyone else was standing as well. So Marshall smiled and walked toward his father along Ethel’s chair. When he reached the edge of her chair and had nothing to hold onto, he kept going in wobbly, tentative steps.
“Marshall my boy, come on! Come to daddy!” Surprised by his son’s first independent steps, Will squatted down and opened his arms toward his eleven month old son. Marshall smiled and, encouraged by his father’s love, kept on coming. He wobbled forward about ten steps, then began to fall just as he reached his father’s outstretched arms. Will caught him. “Good boy!” he said, kissing Marshall. The boy—now a toddler instead of a baby—giggled.
Ethel was right behind Marshall most of the way. She embraced Marshall next.
“Were those his first steps?” exclaimed Jerry.
Will looked up; most had been watching. “Yes, they were! He’s been cruising along furniture for two weeks or walking with someone holding his hand, but this was his first unaided solo trip!”
“Wow, that was something to see, then!” exclaimed Monika, smiling.
“Better contact mission control and ask them to save the tape for you,” suggested Érico. He pointed to the Habitat’s ceiling cameras as well as to the camera they had set up to tape the conference. The ceiling camera’s images were stored twenty-four hours, then destroyed, and not looked at unless an emergency developed.
“It looks like the development of walking is roughly normal here,” commented Jerry.
“He’s following the terrestrial growth charts in most indicators,” agreed Ethel, though there was a note of worry in her voice. “Except his bones are a bit thin, so we plan to start putting weights in his clothes once he can walk, so they experience more normal stresses.”
Madhu rose and walked over. She carefully got down on the floor so that she could embrace Marshall. He turned to her happily and embraced her as well; she often provided child care and so he was close to her.
Then Madhu rose stiffly and uncomfortably. She turned to Roger. “I need to stretch; let’s go for a little walk.”
He nodded, and they headed out the door. Marshall turned back to his daddy and walked three steps unaided, then fell into his father’s embrace.
-----------------------------
They returned from their break a half an hour later when the panel in Houston was ready to critique their brainstorming session. The long time delay made rapid exchange impossible, but two sequential panel discussions seemed to be a fairly good forum for discussing mission plans. With twenty-three professionals and extensive equipment on Mars, much of the decision making had to come from the people carrying out the work. But ground control provided hundreds of support personnel of all sorts, most of whom provided support for the lunar and orbital facilities as well, so their priorities and abilities had to be engaged as well.
The Houston panel was hardly surprised by the ideas from Mars; Will had been engaged in extensive email discussions over the previous few sols and the agenda he offered had been shaped by that exchange. Consequently the comments coming from Houston were cautionary or supplemental, not critical. Drilling priorities hadn’t been mentioned; the driller at the North Pole hadn’t penetrated as far as desired and a south pole drilling effort had been desired. Plans to revisit known fossil sites could not be accommodated if the vehicles were all tied up. The Phobos mission might require a shuttle flight anyway if the docking problem was caused by the Lifter’s mechanism, as was increasingly suspected. Having all the vehicles out on expeditions somewhat limited work around the Outpost, where buggies provided only limited capacity. There was no time in the proposed schedule to obtain more gold; Will was surprised that was mentioned, as gold harvesting would have been considered a dangerous waste of time six months earlier. Reducing the quality of the road raised safety concerns if an emergency required driving vehicles at a high speed. The second building couldn’t be finished before Columbus 4 arrived, raising issues of crowding and redundancy in case of emergency, although the portahabs and conestogas had ample backup space. Providing consumables, equipment, and ground support for thirty-three people would be difficult and expensive.
Different ground support people expressed different concerns, and some responded with solutions. Then Will and his team had a chance to respond to the panel in Houston. Perhaps the most innovative suggestion came from Érico.
“We’ve already talked about reducing each expedition to five people,” he said. “We explored the north polar terrains with five during Columbus 2 and it was fine. We used a conestoga, two rangers, a portahab, and a truck with a nuke. I think we can replace one ranger with two buggies with considerable safety and flexibility, though. The two buggies would pull the portahab robotically. We’d clear the trail with one ranger, with the conestoga following slowly behind to clean it up. The daily exploration team would use the buggies and the portahab. They could leave the portahab on the trail and head off to places of interest with the the buggies. The conestoga would be available to either the exploration crew or the lead ranger in an emergency.”
“Brilliant!” exclaimed Will. “That would solve some of our other problems. It’d free up two rangers to be at the Outpost some of the time, to run drilling equipment in various places, and to get gold. Of course, that would place further strains on our human resources.”
“We have a spare portahab here,” added Ethel. “So we would be in the position to set up a complete third expedition if need be.”
“Don’t get too ambitious,” cautioned Pavel. “We can only do so much.”
“We’d have to reconfigure the buggies,” noted Érico. “They aren’t designed to pull heavy loads. Hitching two of them together will be complicated.”
“But it’s possible,” said Will.
“I have a comment about the issue of road quality,” said Jerry. “As I recall from the time I was capcom for Columbus 2, we have never needed the ability to drive sixty kilometers per hour on our dirt trails. The road clearing crews never get more than about twelve kilometers ahead of the exploration team. So if there’s an emergency, even at forty kilometers per hour—which would be a manageable speed—the conestoga could get to the ranger or the exploration team in seven or eight minutes, as opposed to five minutes. It’s not a huge difference.”
“This idea addresses almost all the issues raised in Houston, so let’s give them a chance to respond,” suggested Will. “That’ll take half an hour or so.”
“If I can comment about the concern that thirty-three people will strain the supply capacity of Columbus 4,” added Ethel. “I think that’s not so true, once the mass savings of not needing a habitat or as many greenhouses are concerned. Furthermore, this change might allow reduction in the number of rangers flown here.”
“Good point,” agreed Will.
They all took a second break. Madhu rose painfully. She had not been paying close attention to the discussion and had occasionally appeared to be in pain. Roger rose with her, and quietly they left the room together. They returned as the panel in Houston began to comment, but rose again and left after a few minutes. Will watched them go, momentarily surprised.
But he had to focus on the discussion. The head of surface vehicle operations spoke at length about the qualities of the buggies and their limitations and the problems of clearing a trail with only one ranger. By the time he finished, it was unclear whether he was in favor or opposed to the plan.
Others expressed more general concerns. Columbus 2 had explored with two rangers, but there were risks in that mode and only a third ranger or conestoga solved them all. Using buggies was a stopgap, but not a wise final solution. Others disagreed. Above all, if a third team were sent out using the extra ranger, portahab, and buggies, it would cause severe labor shortages for other tasks.
The safety of sending a Phobos mission was also questioned; there was already enough fuel for Columbus 3’s departure and the Lifter could be taken care of then. It was not clear that the extra fuel could be used.
Additional comments were made about the need to drill the northern layered terrain, even though it was now too late in the season and would have to wait for the next northern summer. Will shifted in his chair; panel exchanges got tedious after a while.
The Outpost folks responded. There were ways to rearrange the crew to send out an occasional third expedition; when a crew rotation occurred the other two expeditions would have only four people, sparing four people temporarily who could go out in the other vehicles. There were times the Outpost crew would have less construction to do. Will was not sure the proposals were that convincing, so he suggested another approach that might work.
They ended their response and took yet another break. Jerry turned to Will. “Now the tedious part begins. I hate a day of give and take like this.”
“Let’s propose something better, then, if we can think of an alternate. I suppose there’s enough data for both sides to go away, put together a proposal based on the exchange, and exchange them. Lassen and his lieutenants will make the final decision afterward.”
“We could propose that,” agreed Jerry. He looked around. “Where are Roger and Madhu?”
“They left during the Houston presentation.” Will pulled out his portable phone and dialed Roger’s number. He held it at arm’s length to see Roger’s face; he could hear the audio in his earplug.
“Hello? Oh, Will. Sorry we didn’t tell you. Madhu’s here in sick bay.”
“What’s happening?”
“She’s started labor! She’s a month early and has had trouble preventing this from happening. Eve thinks it’s best to let the birth happen.”
“And the baby?”
“He’ll be premature by a month; not a great situation, but Eve says we should be able to handle it.”
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Ah; say a prayer.” Roger sounded worried.
“I’ll do that right away. Give us a call when there’s news.”
“I will. Bye.”
“Bye.”