A single line scrolls across an empty console at the far end of the spine: MARS APPROACH INITIATED. Nobody is awake to read it. The Ares drifts on in the dark, its torus ring turning slowly, and ahead of it, no bigger than a coin held at arm's length, hangs a red disc.
Lena wakes before the alarm. She has done this every morning for seven months and knows the sounds of the ship the way she knows her own breathing, and something has changed. She pulls herself out of the sleep pod and into the spine, and there at the end of it is a glow that was never there before, faint and warm, coming through the forward viewport like light under a door.
She floats toward it. The glass fills.
Mars is not the dot she has watched for weeks. It is a world now, with weather. The great wound of Valles Marineris runs across its face. The northern cap shines white. A dust storm boils in the south, and at the planet's edge the atmosphere is a thin bright line, so thin it looks like a mistake. Olympus Mons lifts its summit above the clouds. Lena's face is lit from below by a planet, and the expression on it is not fear and not quite joy. It is wonder, pure and uncomplicated, the kind children have.
James joins her, and the scientist takes over. He presses a finger to the glass and traces a flat plain between two old craters, the place he has studied on maps for three years. On the console beside him the robot survey map blinks through its list: R1 through R6, all reporting, habitat nominal, reactor nominal, hydroponics nominal. A home has been waiting for them for two years, built by machines that have never seen a human face.
Yuki watches from her own porthole, alone, and writes a single word in her notebook. The film does not show us what it is. Mikhail sees the planet from across the spine and stops, one hand gripping the viewport frame hard enough to whiten the knuckles. He is the pilot. He is the one who will have to put them down on that.
Then all four of them are at the glass together, and the camera pulls back outside the ship so that we see them the way the planet sees them: four small figures in a lit window on a thin metal hull, silhouetted against something very large and very old. Nobody speaks. The music that has been whispering for two minutes finally stands up, and the choir comes in.
Lena puts her palm flat against the glass.
It is the third time she has done this. She did it on the earth of the launch facility the morning they left, and on the viewport of the Ares when Earth was still blue and close. Now her hand covers Mars. For a moment the shot holds on just that: a palm, and a planet, and the thickness of a pane of glass between them.
The Ares slides into orbit. Mikhail plots the descent window, numbers scrolling, and the outpost appears below as a cluster of pale shapes on a dark lava plain: domes, solar arrays, a landing pad swept clean. James opens the feed from R1's camera, and the lead robot, standing on the surface, tilts its head up toward the ship it has been waiting for. Its status light turns green. UPLINK ESTABLISHED.
James breaks. Three years of calculation, seven months of silence, and now a machine on another planet has looked up and said hello. He covers his face with his hands and his shoulders shake, and Lena puts a hand on his back and leaves it there.
Below them Mars turns, red and patient, and the ship is a speck against it. Fade to black. Tomorrow they go down.
