For a while after Helene had left, the Martians had discussed together their options.  Elijah had raged against them for taking Harper (although there were witnesses who could vouch for Helene's claim that it was voluntary), and also for taking the rover with them.  There were several other Martians who were also angry, but none of them thought it was a good idea to attempt to stop them, or even that it would be possible.  There was also, along with sorrow at losing Harper so soon after losing Alexander, a sense of relief at seeing most of the Earthlings go.  A few of those on the ship had made friends on Mars, but relations between the two groups had reached such a low point that it seemed to the remaining Martians that it would be easier to rebuild without most of them there.  Joshua, Jacob, and Sarah were staying, and they each brought valuable skills and knowledge; the rest were seen as more of a liability than anything, and there was relief to see them go.

Then the next morning, about twelve hours after Helene left, they heard the transmission from the ship cut off abruptly.

Most of them were, by this point, up and moving around.  A few, like Dorothy and Olivia, were listening to the shipboard transmissions via their tablets, which were still on the same network.  Joshua was listening in his apartment alone, wondering when it would be safe for him to reveal that he still had about half of the fish eggs in cold storage, and if they could remake at least a small container for them to hatch in quickly, they might still be able to try again with the fish farm (probably on a smaller scale).  Jacob and Liam were working together in the wreckage of the former fish farm at the top of Building 29, and did not want to listen to anything that distracted them from that.  Sarah was playing games with her granddaughter Ruth, mostly dollmaking.  Across a dozen buildings of the Colony, different people were working, playing, or still waking up, when word quickly spread that something had gone very wrong with the ship launch.

Joshua was the first one to make contact with them afterwards; he still had his Earthling-style communicator, and was able to reach Theodore.

"Dude, are you alive?  What the hell just happened?"

There came a muffled sound that might have been speech.

"I didn't copy, can you repeat?" asked Joshua, urgently.

"Sorry, I've got a cat inside my bubble helmet and he's pissed," said Theodore.  "As for how we're doing, well about half of us are dead, and the other half are crammed into the rover waiting to die.  Other than that, it's all good.  How are you?"

Joshua was, as you may have gathered by this point, not a person often prone to earnest conversation.  Sarcasm or irony were his normal modes of conversation.  For a few long moments, he could not come up with anything to say, because of the enormity of what Theodore had just told him, and his inability to think of anything appropriate to say in response.  Finally, his brain unlocked, and he began talking again, his voice lower in pitch and very serious.

"Dude, where are you exactly, can you see?  Does the rover have your coordinates?"

"No, but that doesn't really matter, because we weren't able to get it out of the ship.  We're still in the bay.  The control panel was crushed, and we cannot open the bay doors, so we can't get the rover out of the ship, so we're all going to die.  We've got only as much oxygen as our suits and the rover has, and that's not much."

"Hold on, tell everyone there to stay cool and try not to breath too much, we're taking the mini-rovers and coming to get you."

There followed a very frenzied thirty minutes as the word spread that there were some survivors, but they were trapped inside the rover, because the rover was trapped inside the ship.

Soon, everyone who was not actually in a mini-rover headed to the launch site (now the crash site), was in Building 3 listening to the open channel as the would-be rescuers discussed what could be done.  The mechsuits would have been ideal for this, but the mini-rovers might not be able to carry their weight, and it would take a long time to walk them to the crash site.  They carried several oxygen bottles with them in the mini-rovers, but there was no clear way to get it to them inside the wrecked ship.  The rover had potentially a large amount of oxygen, but its tanks had not been full at the time of the attempted launch.  When long trips in the rover were attempted, there were additional tanks carried on the wagon behind it; no such measures were in place now, when it was not expected to be used again until it got to Earth.

While attempting to sort all of this out and devise a plan, it was abruptly and more-or-less brusquely communicated who had died, and who was still alive.  The knowledge that Harper had died, along with about half the Earthlings, also threw everyone's emotions into a whirl.  Olivia was, at times, brutally impatient with any time spent grieving.

"We have a lot of people still alive in there, we are thinking about them now," she said.  "The dead will wait, we grieve for them later."

As time went by, though, it became increasingly apparent, that there was simply no time.  Oliver was dispensed to drive a mini-rover back to the Colony, and see if a mechsuit could be brought to the crash site to cut them out before everyone asphyxiated from lack of oxygen.  No one sounded optimistic.

"I can't believe Harper is dead," said Mildred.  She and the rest of the New Soil Crew had naturally gravitated to their normal meeting spot at one end of Building 3, although they were listening to the audio feed from the crash site like everyone else.

"How much oxygen do they have?" asked Dorothy, frowning.  She was also stunned by losing Harper (and Ophelia), but the enormity of it had not really hit yet.

"About an hour," said Stanley.  "Maybe less."

"How long will it take them to get them out of there?" asked Dorothy.

There was a long silence.  The mechsuits had metal-cutting attachments, but it wasn't their primary purpose, and the exterior of the spaceship was quite sturdy.  Realistically, it could take days.

"We need to buy them more time," said Dorothy.

"How do we do that?" asked Stanley.

"They need more oxygen," said Eugene.

"If we had a hole big enough to fit an oxygen tank through," said Stanley, "we could just take the people out instead.  The oxygen tanks are not small."

"What if we just threaded a hose through?" asked Eugene.

"But the outside of the spaceship is thick," said Stanley, "and it's probably a tangled mess right now.  It's not like you just poke a hole in it and put the hose in.  It will take probably a meter or more of hose to get through the hull, and that's if it doesn't have to turn around corners and go back and forth to get there.  We can't do that with a hose.  You'd have to make a hole all the way through the hull, through a tangle of wires and conduit and pipes, and that will take a lot of time."

"Can they make a hole from the inside?" asked Dorothy.

"Maybe," said Stanley, "but more likely they would be even slower than us, because they don't have the tools."

"There is at least one hole already there," said Dorothy, "that's why the rover bay doesn't have oxygen anymore."

"Probably it's more like a long tear," said Stanley.

"It is," said Dorothy, "but they said it was too tangled to get a hose through; they've been trying."

"I bet Orange Yellow could," said Raymond.

Dorothy looked over at her brother, who had decided to come along.  There was a long pause.

"But we don't have a rat-shaped pressure suit for Outside," said Stanley.

"She'll be carrying the end of an oxygen tube," said Dorothy.  "She'll have plenty of air to breathe."

"She'll freeze!" said Stanley.  "Will she even live long enough to get through the hull?"

"It's not that cold out right now," said Eugene, looking at his new tablet (which already had a crack in the screen, but still worked).  "15 degrees Celsius.  Not bad, really; almost comfortable."

"Can she pull the tube all the way to the rover?" asked Stanley.

"She won't have to," said Dorothy, "she just needs to get it through the tear in the hull, maybe a meter; then someone on the inside can grab it and pull it the rest of the way through."

"Why aren't the adults doing that, then?" asked Stanley.

"Because they don't know we have a rat that's trained to move left and right when we tell it to," said Mildred.  "Ok, if we're going to catch Oliver before he takes off again in the mini-rover, we'd better hurry."

"Mildred and I will keep Oliver from leaving," said Dorothy rapidly, "you three get Orange Yellow and bring her to Building 14; that's where the mechsuits are so that's where he'll be.  Go!"

When the New Soil Crew (plus Raymond, who seemed to be hanging out with them more often lately) walked through Building 3, it was pretty obvious that they were hurrying, trying not to run (so as not to attract attention, so as not to be stopped and asked to explain what they were doing).  But all of the adults present were too focused on the audio feed from the ship crash site, to pay much attention.

As soon as they were into the tunnels, they broke into a sprint.