Or cowgirls. As fluctuations would have it, the men were fine.
Hurried preparations went on all around her in the cockpit/hab while she lolled in her g-couch, following Viktor’s orders and not thinking about the food he offered and looking out the port at the big creamy world she was about to leave. The return ship was full of fuel, waiting for them on Mars.
Planets perform a grand gavotte, forcing humans to dance to the same grave rhythms. Viktor checked and rechecked their ship. The most fuel-stingy method of reaching Mars, or any other world, started by slipping away from Earth’s nearly circular orbit on a long, slow tangent. Their boost would start them on this glide, an ellipse that paralleled Earth’s orbit at one end and that of Mars at the other. Sliding like a bead along this smooth course, they would swoop near Mars at a velocity very nearly that of the planets.
But getting there meant hitting the window. Leave a month late and the fuel cost ran up enormously. Leave half a year late and no rocket imaginable could get you around the long loop in time; you would chase Mars all around its orbit—watching the blue-green world dwindle away, as every second, that oasis of air and water fell behind another 33 kilometers. Even moving that fast, a thousand times the speed of the Apollo missions to the moon, it would take six months to ride the 400 million kilometers.
Axelrod did a ’cast with them, saying confidently, “We’re going to Mars!” to big background applause. She tried not to throw up, for several reasons.
All systems were go. So they went.
11
JANUARY 14, 2018
THEY HAD ALL BEEN SHAKEN UP BY THE AEROBRAKING ON ARRIVAL. SURE, the simulations had been tough—harder vibrations than at liftoff, gut-wrenching swerves as they hit high-altitude turbulence that nobody had predicted (and what if they had?).
Coming in, they had to lose several kilometers per second of speed. Doing that by rocket braking would have imposed a considerable fuel cost. So they used friction, just like ordinary brakes. Slamming into even the tenuous CO2 atmosphere meant heating their aeroshell to the same temperature range that the Shuttle tiles had to endure.
The hard-hammering jolts came in all three axes at once. Like a dog shaking a rag doll, she thought as her stomach lurched. She tried to pay attention, through the shattering noise—a wall of sound that threatened at each new shrill note, as if the whole hab were starting to come apart. And through that came the incredibly calm drone of Viktor’s voice, somehow close and personal in her headset.
“Coming up on max delta, heading at four four three seven, coming close to margin on that. In the envelope, adjusting for pitch, altitude four eight seven.”
He was talking to Marc but it had a hugely comforting effect on her. She knew that he was documenting every step in real time, so that if something failed, at least there might be some record of what went wrong. One of the pre-positioned orbiting comm satellites for the Mars Outpost program was receiving whatever signal could escape the plasma discharge glow that made them look like a fresh orange comet high up in the Martian day.
She held on through it all, praying to Viktor, not God, to bring them through the long agonizing minutes while they skated around a quarter of the planet. Wind friction howled and the rugged shell in their nose turned bright red, shedding its nose tiles like a spaceship with skin disease. Then—whang! whoomp!—they blew the aeroshell and the heavy hand of deceleration lifted a bit.
The hab rotated abruptly, pulled by the deploying parachutes into a wrenching one-eighty. Noises trickled away. A sudden silence.
They were swaying beneath their chute canopy and suddenly she was cheering, they all were. Falling, still, but slower—
Their rocket flared with a roar, working with the chutes. Viktor was calling out numbers, getting smaller—their altitude, seventeen, fourteen…in kilometers. They had crossed hundreds of millions of kilometers and now just eight klicks…five…
She had held her breath. Amateurish, but to hell with that.
Liftoff had been rough, sure, but they had not had to hit a patch of sky a few klicks across. Just anywhere in orbit would do; correct for it later.
This time Viktor had to put them smack next to the Earth Return Vehicle, the ERV. Sure, close enough to reach with a dune buggy would be okay, though inconvenient for the next year and a half.
Viktor had liked Raoul’s going outside to dump their dung—saved a ton of mass that didn’t have to be gingerly lowered onto Mars with their precious fuel. He used the extra fuel now, bringing them in at less than one hundred klicks/hour to a near hover a few kilometers up. He used the radar altimeter, the Outpost Mars location finder beacon. And not to forget the external camera that was feeding the view to Earthside, making Axelrod millions per moment.
“Easy, heading one eight three, drifting north… I see the site. ERV. Looks like home!… Coming up…got parking spot all picked out…”
A roaring. “Plenty dust…touch… Engines off!”
After the eerie first hour, the magic of Mars lifted enough to make Raoul walk over to the ERV. First priority was his checkout. It was a pleasant stroll, crossing ruddy rock-strewn land they had seen a thousand times through the dune buggy TV eyes. Julia ambled off to the left, kicked a rock to see it tumble away in the delicious low g. Then she heard Raoul groan in her suit comm.
By the time she got to the ERV, Raoul had crawled up under it. She saw what he had—a dark stain on the sand, maybe as big as two hands across. Small. But enough.
The ERV had had no human to guide it. Given that, its performance was miraculous. It had touched down within 2.3 kilometers of the exact center of its ellipse. A tribute to NASA’s skill.
But Raoul quickly found that it had come in off-level. No problem, but a strut had jammed against a boulder. At its descent speed, the jar and wrench had crushed fuel pipes and valves around the thruster.
“How come none of the diagnostics detected this?” Marc demanded.
Raoul had just crawled out from under the cowling, while the others stood waiting nervously, looking at the twisted strut.
“Those lines were not pressurized,” Raoul said.
Viktor said nothing, just ducked and went under to look for himself.
When he emerged he was frowning. “A yaw failure in aerobraking maneuver, probably. Ship came in too fast. Only a shade too fast would do it.”
Marc swore.
“How bad is it?” Julia asked.
“Not too bad, I think,” said Raoul. But he grimaced, which told the true story. “And I am without a real machine shop,” a phrase they all would get very tired of hearing. “I will have to improvise.”
After the shock of it the men said little. She understood—why stress the obvious? Fix it, or die.
Julia sat at the comm, savoring her last mug of tea. Soon enough she and Marc would have to suit up and go outside the hab for the liftoff test. Raoul and Viktor had just left. She’d felt a thump as the outer door of the air lock closed after them.
They generally worked in pairs. Backup systems were the order of the day, always. Redundancy was the key to survival.
On Mars, the threats were redundant also. If the cold didn’t get you, the atmosphere would. If both of them failed, the dryness was always waiting. Not to mention the damned toxic dust.
The buddy system had a proud tradition on Earth, from scuba diving to NASA, she mused. On the flatscreen she watched as two colorful suits, one yellow and one purple, walked outside across the landscape, one skipping lightly, one walking carefully, toward the ERV.
