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LOG ENTRY: VANTAS
SOL 6
I’m pretty much fucked.
That’s my expert opinion.
Fucked.
Six days into what should have been the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare.
I don’t even know who’ll find this. I guess someone will eventually, maybe a hundred years from now.
Just for the record, I didn’t die on Sol 6. The rest of the crew thinks I did, and not without reason. I mean, the last thing they saw was me being blown off in the wind, impaled on the fucking transmission antenna, shortly before my depressurization alarm went off and my bio-signs dropped to zero. Maybe they’ll have a national day of mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say “Karkat Vantas is one of only two humans to have died on Mars.” I say one of two because Nepeta is here with me. She’s alive.
Anyway, it’d be right. We are the only humans to die on Mars, just not on Sol 6 like everyone thinks.
Nepeta is sleeping right now. Her shoulder got speared pretty bad, but hey, so did my torso.
I guess I should explain how we’re alive. When we got speared, there was a lot of blood (duh). The water in the blood quickly boiled off, leaving a bunch of gunk that quickly accumulated enough to reduce the leaks to a manageable size. Unfortunately for us, the antenna’s points managed to spear my bio-monitor directly, and cut the line feeding power to and transmitting data from Nepeta’s. Combine that with the pressure alarm, and being thrown down the hill with a giant antenna stuck through you, and it would seem a pretty safe bet to assume we died.
Thank god I’m not a gambler.
The Hab got pretty shaken up in the storm, but everything inside it seems to work ok. For now. This whole setup was designed to last, maximum, 63 days.
If the oxygenator breaks down, we'll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks, we'll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, we'll just kind of implode. If none of those things happen, we’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
So yeah. We’re fucked.
LOG ENTRY: LEIJON
SOL 6
I really don’t want to think about how we ended up in this situation. The storm, I mean. I never liked big storms back on Earth, so when they told me that in order to go to Mars I would have to be in a tent with 150 KPH winds blasting the sides with sand, it made me a little nervous.
“We’re going to put you on top of a bomb, explode you into orbit, then put you in a can that vents radioactive gas out the back, and send you 48,678,219 miles away from everything else, to a place where you need an airtight suit to breathe and not implode.” And what made me nervous were the sandstorms.
All the others told me that the storms were the least of my worries. Well, who’s laughing now, fuckers?
Not me. I’m the one who’s stuck on Mars. Yay.
The Leo program was such a cool opportunity. First attempts to see if a Mars colony is a viable option. And, you know, youngest astronauts ever has a wonderful ring to it.
The basic idea was to send a large group- eight, to be exact- to Mars, to explore how it affected people living in that space together for an extended period. Leo VI was supposed to be on Mars for a whole year. Why couldn’t we have their food reserves?
We were on- I guess, are on- Leo III. Our big experiment was Karkat, me, John, and Roxy. John and Roxy are 21, me and Karkat are 16. They wanted to see if having kids and young adults in space was an actual option, or if it’ll have to wait until space travel is way safer. My money’s on the second one, at least after this.
God, my mother must be beside herself with grief. I wish she knew I’m still alive.
Sure, I’m probably not gonna stay that way for long, but at least I am right now.
I guess I should explain how Mars missions work, for anyone who isn’t a scientist who might be watching this. We get up to the Hermes using a normal rocket, like every other space mission ever. Then we spend a few days getting used to space and getting the rest of our food and supplies, then we ship out for Mars. I don’t really want to reminisce right now, but it was fun, to say the least. Then we got down to mars in the MDV, which is basically a glorified tin can whose only purpose is to get twelve humans from Mars orbit to the surface without killing them. Hey, it worked.
Now, the secret to Mars missions is pre-launching your stuff. When we got up here, all the food and equipment was already here, along with the Mars Ascent Vehicle (or MAV). The MAV has a really cool way of making fuel, but I don’t feel like getting into that now. It’s a real shame we never got to launch in it. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out it was gone.
The other depressing thing is that all our redundant communications systems were in the MAV. Our main source of communications was the antenna, which is no longer operable due to being ripped from the Hab and then impaling two teenagers on its various needles. And all the others need the MAV to work. When the crew left, they (surprise!) took the MAV, and all our comms. So we’re stranded, with absolutely no way to contact anyone.
I think we really might be fucked.