“Fuck you,” he said to the planet below.

Reaching toward the controls on his arm, he winced. Trying again, more slowly this time, he activated his radio. “MAV to Hermes.”

“Watney!?” came the reply.

“Affirmative. That you, Commander?” Watney said.

“Affirmative. What’s your status?”

“I’m on a ship with no control panel,” he said. “That’s as much as I can tell you.”

“How do you feel?”

“My chest hurts. I think I broke a rib. How are you?”

“We’re working on getting you,” Lewis said. “There was a complication in the launch.”

“Yeah,” Watney said, looking out the hole in the ship. “The canvas didn’t hold. I think it ripped early in the ascent.”

“That’s consistent with what we saw during the launch.”

“How bad is it, Commander?” he asked.

“We were able to correct the intercept range with Hermes’s attitude thrusters. But there’s a problem with the intercept velocity.”

“How big a problem.”

“Forty-two meters per second.”

“Well shit.”

• • •

“HEY, AT least he’s okay for the moment,” Martinez said.

“Beck,” Lewis said, “I’m coming around to your way of thinking. How fast can you get going if you’re untethered?”

“Sorry, Commander,” Beck said. “I already ran the numbers. At best I could get twenty-five meters per second. Even if I could get to forty-two, I’d need another forty-two to match Hermes when I came back.”

“Copy,” Lewis said.

“Hey,” Watney said over the radio, “I’ve got an idea.”

“Of course you do,” Lewis said. “What do you got?”

“I could find something sharp in here and poke a hole in the glove of my EVA suit. I could use the escaping air as a thruster and fly my way to you. The source of thrust would be on my arm, so I’d be able to direct it pretty easily.”

“How does he come up with this shit?” Martinez interjected.

“Hmm,” Lewis said. “Could you get forty-two meters per second that way?”

“No idea,” Watney said.

“I can’t see you having any control if you did that,” Lewis said. “You’d be eyeballing the intercept and using a thrust vector you can barely control.”

“I admit it’s fatally dangerous,” Watney said. “But consider this: I’d get to fly around like Iron Man.”

“We’ll keep working on ideas,” Lewis said.

“Iron Man, Commander. Iron Man.”

“Stand by,” Lewis said.

She furrowed her brow. “Hmm… Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.…”

“You kidding, Commander?” Martinez said. “It’s a terrible idea. He’d shoot off into space—”

“Not the whole idea, but part of it,” she said. “Using atmosphere as thrust. Martinez, get Vogel’s station up and running.”

“Okay,” Martinez said, typing at his keyboard. The screen changed to Vogel’s workstation. Martinez quickly changed the language from German to English. “It’s up. What do you need?”

“Vogel’s got software for calculating course offsets caused by hull breaches, right?”

“Yeah,” Martinez said. “It estimates course corrections needed in the event of—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Lewis said. “Fire it up. I want to know what happens if we blow the VAL.”