Excerpt from “Two Birds,” by Cheryl Smith

The Halo was long, bulky, and vaguely prism-shaped, with none of the detailed hardware that had come to characterize the outer hulls of long-distance vessels. It was bright and shiny white so it was always easily identifiable in satellite pictures monitored by NASA, and it looked nice and pretty in the TRIMAX movies for the folks back home.
Cody and Nuell had flown many missions together over the past twelve years. Nuell had been one of NASA’s top systems engineers for some time before they recruited him to man the space station where Cody had been conducting the dark matter experiments that led to the discovery of nisma, the particle that, when isolated by methods prescribed by Dr. Sharp, could power a ship through the known violence of a black hole and possibly into the fifth dimension. They tried to retire after the Wheaties box. Then the Russians flew an automated research vessel to Mars to establish a camp there. NASA responded the very next day by announcing that the United States was going to send two astronauts to the surface of the stormy red planet and recover them via high-speed shuttle (powered by Cody’s own discovery). So there.
To accomplish this feat, NASA covertly hired the man responsible for the Russian Mars flight to supervise their own. Besides being the most learned earthling in matters of the red planet, Svetlanov held the proud distinction of being married to the cosmonaut with the record for the longest period of weightlessness. Astrid was part of a team on a Russian space station for four years (during that time she also proved that pregnancy and childbirth, with some illness and difficulty, was possible in a weightless environment. Needless to say, Svetlanov was not the father of that child, as his experiments kept him earthbound-- but that’s another story). The journey from Earth to Mars would be comparatively brief.
Svetlanov had considered training total strangers for the mission, but he had to be more subtle than that; the enthusiasm of shaping a new team was the American way, and that foolish mentality could lead to petty disagreements that might cripple the research and waste valuable time. To send two friends, capable and mellow, was the better choice. Sharp and Mitchell, known casually as Rondo and Mitch among their colleagues, were young enough to make the trip and accomplished enough to impress the scrutinizing boards, and they were given Cody’s dark matter experiments to keep them busy. It was like killing two birds with one stone, but Svetlanov preferred not to use that phrase.
To further occupy his time, Cody started a journal.