Red Planet Run by Dana Stabenow

Hydroponics. Mom and Pop. “Clap if you believe in kobolds.”
    My head, manipulated by an invisible wire, swiveled until I was staring directly at Paddy and Sean, sitting side by side against the wall. A Paddy and Sean who had abandoned the now passé look in Sphinx for the latest in seraphim, cherubim, and thrones. “Gosh, that was great adobo, Auntie Charlie,” Sean said brightly. “May I have some more, please?”
    Mute, Paddy held out her plate, too.
    I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. John Begaye backed up a step.
    I blew the breath out. “That’s it,” I said. Even Charlie looked apprehensive.
    “I quit.”
    I looked at Helen. “I’ll go to Mars for you.” I looked back at the twins. “So long as it’s a package deal. The twins come, too.”
    The angels were abandoned to their own devices to be immediately replaced by astonishment and gathering dismay.
    “I wouldn’t dream of separating the three of you,” Helen said, and her fleeting, ephemeral smile slid out of the room as quickly and unobtrusively as it had slid in.

— 3 —
Soft-Shoe Shuttle
     
Once more, once more, to go to sea once more
A man must be blind to make up his mind
To go to sea once more.
     
—old sea chanty
     
     
    I FELT MORE LIKE SPAM in a can than the god in the machine.
    “How we doing, Crip?” He didn’t reply at once. “Crip?”
    “In a minute, dammit.”
    “What’s the matter with you?” I demanded. “In thirty years and a kazillion launches, I’ve never heard you this edgy.” He mumbled something, probably uncomplimentary. “What was that?”
    “Hold on,” he said testily. “I gotta make a course correction.”
    “What? Why? I thought we were plugged into insertion.”
    He didn’t answer, and I waited, strapped into my deceleration couch, which on Mars would be my bed, and stared at the opposite bulkhead, which on Mars would be the ceiling of my stateroom. In a few moments Crip came back on. “Friggin’ IMU, nothing’s worked right this trip. It’s the goddam Great Galactic Ghoul, is what it is!”
    Great Galactic Ghoul? “I beg your pardon?”
    There was a pause. When Crip spoke again he sounded sheepish. “Sort of a legend around these parts. There’s a history of spaceships going out of control on approach to Mars.”
    “So?”
    “So it’s sort of a Bermuda Triangle in vacuum. Spacers made up the Great Galactic Ghoul to account for the disappearing ships.”
    And disappearing ships’ crews? I wondered, but didn’t say. “You’re the last person I figured to be superstitious, Crip.”
    “Superstitious my ass, Svensdotter,” he snapped, “Mariner 4 had control problems, so did Mariner 7; Mariner 9’s navigational system went haywire, fourteen Russian probes failed both orbit and/or touchdown; no one has ever found so much as a single nut off Fobos 1 or 2, and you want to tell me what happened to the Observer , the Newton, and the Sagdeyev ?”
    “I don’t know,” I said meekly.
    “Nobody does,” he said, triumphant.
    I’d heard worse. I’d even heard dumber. I kept my mouth shut and let Crip stave off the efforts of the Great Galactic Ghoul to put a spin on our tail.
    It had been a short, uneventful trip, thirty days door to doorstep, and now Crip and the twins and I had withdrawn to our respective ships; the twins and I to wait out the interval, Crip to perform all the minute, finicking, down-to-the-wire corrections in our vernier-assisted trajectory that would, hopefully, insert us into the Martian atmosphere at the proper angle.
    I wasn’t worried. Crip always got me from point to point in one piece. As sure as I was lying there, staring at the soon-to-be ceiling, he was sweating and swearing over the console in the Pushmepullyou, coaxing that little bit of extra thrust out of Starboard Vernier Number 23 that would make the difference between popping our drogue over Chryse Planitia or, the way the planets were lined up that afternoon, the Huyghens Rift on Titan. Well,