On Mars Pathfinder (The Mike Lane Stories Book 1) (7 page)

The release of the parachutes was a pivotal moment. They had been pressure packed and frozen in the cold of deep space for over eight months. There was the ever-so-slight risk they simply wouldn’t deploy. I didn’t hear anything, but I did feel them and see them deploy through the dorsal portal. Aside from them deploying at all, the concern was that all three of them should deploy, and that they should all deploy at the same time. If one had failed, I would still survive the landing but I would have gone wildly off course, winding up too far from the Habitat to make it there on my own. Thankfully I could see all three had snapped into full shape. The effect was like being suddenly slammed in the back as my own body’s momentum dug into the flight couch; the flight couch which was again no longer travelling as fast as I was. This only lasted about two or three seconds. I started breathing easier as the speed of the couch and the momentum of my body came into balance.

These parachutes were not for a straight descent purpose. The Lander was tilted backwards, moving forward through the thickening atmosphere, the aeroshell absorbing the increasing friction heat. It was still going quite fast. The parachutes were providing the necessary drag to slowly bleed off more speed from the forward momentum. The mass of the Lander and its initial speed compounded by the thin atmosphere meant that the parachute assisted aero-braking was still going to take some time. I was going to be under canopy, relatively speaking, for another ten minutes. In the final 50 seconds of the canopy braking, the Lander had slowed enough that it was now under a direct parachute descent over the colony site, over my new home. However, the parachutes, while fine for braking, were woefully inadequate for straight descent. I started picking up speed again, slowly.

Roughly twenty-four minutes after separating from the MTV, the second of three RAD rocket assemblies would fire. The Rocked Assisted Descent motors took over, and did what the atmosphere and parachutes couldn’t do. They would get me safely to the surface, and on target.

A full second before this next RAD assembly fired, the flight computer fired three tiny rocket propelled guillotines, which cut the parachute harness for each of the canopies. That one second of time allowed the Lander and parachute canopies to move far enough apart, that the falling parachutes would not interfere with the rest of the Landing sequence.

With the second RAD assembly engines instantly coming to full power, I was thrust deeper into the flight couch as the ship slowed dramatically in the space of a few seconds. These engines burned for twenty seconds as they positioned the Lander over the final landing site, and slowed my descent considerably. On cue, three small explosions jettisoned the second RAD assembly. At that instant, because I was so close to the colony site, two rockets on the second discarded RAD assembly came to life. Those small rockets carried the assembly several kilometres down-field where it crashed into the sand dunes of Hyperboreae Undae. Had I been able to look out the starboard portal, I would have seen it crash in the distance. I thought briefly about the amount of litter I was creating. I was going to have to go around and pick this stuff up some day. Yeah, I could still hug trees even if there are no actual trees to hug.

The second RAD assembly had slowed me drastically, almost to a complete stop of downward motion. With the second RAD assembly jettisoned and flying off to the south, the Lander began a vertical free fall descent.

Very quickly, at 60 metres above the surface of Mars, the third and final RAD cluster fired. As this final assembly was attached directly to the hull of the Lander, I could hear the three engines, and they were
loud
. I soon heard another mechanical sound or perhaps I just felt it. This was the six landing struts being deployed. My excitement was becoming unbearable. The firing of the third and final RAD assembly brought me to a complete stop at 3 metres above the surface. As the RAD quickly burned out, the Lander settled with a hard jolt onto the surface of the planet, the design of the landing legs causing them to act as shock absorbers, cushioning the final drop.

I scanned all the instrumentation and took a deep breath. It hit me hard as the sound of the RAD engines faded. I was finally on Mars.
I was finally on freaking
MARS!!! I let out a war whoop of joy, and pumped my fists in the air. The good Lord had delivered me safely. I was finally here and I couldn’t wait to get out of the tin can, to put my space-suited foot on the surface. I pulled the three restraint release levers, and bounded out of my seat. I came out of it so fast I almost went ass over tea-kettle, catching myself just in time. Oh yes, one-third gravity. It had been a long time since I had been in gravity (almost eight and a half months), so I took a moment to let my body, brain, and organs get used to the concept again; and let the brief wave of accompanying nausea pass. I pulled up the Mar-Sat image of the landing site on my tablet. I was only off by 17 metres. That’s a lot, but again, Chasma Boreale is a windy place. I was only about half a kilometre from the Hab (Habitat) as planned. In retrospect, being only 17 metres off target after travelling over one hundred and sixty million kilometres wasn’t that bad at all.

I touched the COM button on my suit controller and transmitted a message to Terra. I said, “Mission Control, Pathfinder. I’m happy to report I touched down about a minute ago. It was completely successful and went according to plan. I’m preparing to exit the Lander now.” The message system was on live feed so as I talked, the Lander uplinked the signal to Mar-Sat. The audio was on its way to Terra as fast as I was saying the words. The worlds wouldn’t arrive though, for another 18 minutes and 20 seconds (approximately).

A shadow passed over the port side portal. I glanced that way but couldn’t see anything. It had to be one of the parachutes following the Lander down.

I moved over to where the handheld camera was stored, unboxed it, turned it on and made sure it was recording. It had been hooked into the ships system and began to top off the battery charge when the Lander powered up in orbit. The battery was full, and would record for twelve hours non-stop before needing to be recharged. The handheld camera itself could record over three hundred hours of video imagery before I had to download it. I had two cameras on my Activity Suit as well. One was outboard on the helmet recording wherever I turned my body. The second was inside the helmet recording my face with a tiny fish-eye lens. I grabbed the tablet that was providing my Lander system readings, undocked it from the panel in front of the flight couch, and did a quick system query with the Habitat’s COM over a guest connection. That limited guest connection would be replaced with a full connection once I had time to pair my tablet and my suit’s COM system to the Habitats. That wouldn’t happen, though, until I was inside the Habitat, out of my Activity Suit and chillaxin’ on Mars! For now my suit was uplinked to Mar-Sat through the Lander. All systems showed operational, 3000 Kg of oxygen, 500 liters of water, full electrical charge in the batteries, and the solar collectors were operating nominally.

I moved over to the airlock. I had put a bunch of personal stuff in there while transferring supplies when I was still in orbit. They were still securely attached to the anchor points provided. As I was about to shut the inner airlock door, I stopped and thought a moment about the U.S. Air Force briefing I had received prior to departure. I turned back into the cabin of the Lander, found the two elongated cases with no markings, and detached them from their straps. I put them in the airlock, and then shut the inner airlock door behind me.

I checked to make sure both my suit cameras were recording and began a brief statement that was also being uplinked to Mar-Sat in live-time through the Landers COM array. In eighteen minutes and a titch, they would see it on Terra.

“Hello Earth! This is Mike Lane reporting to you from the surface of Mars! My Lander safely touched down just over five minutes ago. I’m in the Lander airlock now, I’m ready to depressurize, and open the outer hatch.” I reached over and pressed my gloved hand against the button to cycle the airlock to a pressure equivalent to that outside the Lander. As the pumps whirred and sucked the atmosphere from the now cramped airlock, I continued. “I have to tell you that I’m humbled today. I stand on the shoulders of giants and I’m able to reach even further because of what they did. Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space, paved the way for all who followed him. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, well, they fired our imagination with Neil’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. Today is going to be the follow-up, the sequel to what those brave men did. Today we are one step further into the Verse.”

Pressure balancing was complete, and the hatch was ready to open. “In just a few moments I’m going to open the outer airlock hatch and take humanity’s first step on a planet other than Earth. I’ll be making that first step on the planet that has so often been the subject of science-fiction, speculation, poetry and prose. It’s no longer a dream though folks. With this first step, mankind will truly be an inter-planetary …”

The airlock was filled with a flash of light so bright that my breath caught in my throat, and I closed my eyes reflexively. This was compounded at the exact same moment by the loudest sound I had ever heard, and the feeling of my body, my whole world, being catapulted and turned upside down. I screamed as I slammed into the rear of the airlock; or more precisely, the rear of the airlock rushing towards me slammed into my body. I blacked out as my head dangerously bounced around inside my helmet.

Mission Control

It was just after two in the morning in Sweden. There was a chill in the air, and large snowflakes gently fell through the night sky; the sticky kind of snowflakes that clung to everything. They clung to Carrie Oolsen’s tightly braided blond hair, as she ran into the Corporation’s night entrance, just down the hall from Mission Control proper. She had to wait for her babysitter to arrive at her home, a fifteen-minute drive from the Corporation’s complex, before the thirty-seven year old widowed mom of two could leave for work. She had been due in at midnight, and had wanted to get there even earlier. It was Descent Day after all; everyone was wound up and excited. That plan didn’t quite work when the babysitter got there late. A traffic mess had been created by a transport truck on a slippery curve in the road.

The self-trained computer genius and video expert ran to her shared office to throw her coat and briefcase into the corner, she picked up her travel mug, stopped to fill it with rich black coffee, and then bolted for Mission Control. As she burst through the door, one of the media lackeys jumped in surprise, and sent an explosion of paperwork falling around him. Hans Gohs, the Flight Director and now one of the Mission Directors looked over at her, smiled and touched his nose. She smiled back in embarrassment, and headed to her workstation. Her skill, commitment, and dedication bought her leeway with Hans; but she still did not like taking advantage of that.

The afternoon shift tech was still sitting there and wasn’t in a rush to leave. He gave up his seat for her, but grabbed another nearby chair and hunkered in beside her. Arno Lidstrom was as excited as Carrie was. He also thought she was kind of cute, in a frumpy way, so he didn’t mind the cramped seating. While he didn’t mind sharing the workstation with her, he had to keep reminding himself, she was on duty; it was time to let her do her job, and keep his hands to himself … in more ways than one. They had four UltraHi-Def monitors at their workstation, which had much clearer and crisper images than those that were being displayed on the large screens at the front of the room. They were probably the only two people in the room that were not watching the big screens, because their pictures were better. Tonight Carrie’s focus (and it would seem Arno’s as well) was to ensure continuity of video feed, and address any problems that came up with it. Because this computer handled the image processing to the bigger screen, there was just over half a second lag time from what they saw, to when everyone else saw it.

She could see the image of Mike Lane in the Lander. Slightly distorted by the curve of his helmets face plate, she could see his teeth were gritted, and he was focused on the instrumentation in front of him. The second screen was the downward camera on the outside of the Lander. The last two screens were images from Mar-Sat, one long range and one upclose on the descending Lander. The targeting systems kept the Lander in the centre of the screens all the way to touchdown.

“Down angle camera please,” Hans Gohs’ voice came from across the room. Arno started to reach towards the console, but Carrie slapped his hand away with a smile. She made the adjustment and the down angle camera on the outside of the Lander now replaced Mike’s image with that of the Martian surface rushing up to meet the Lander. Unfortunately there was a fair amount of rocket engine flaring obscuring the view. Carrie looked over her shoulder and Hans shook his head.
Too much flame and not enough pizzazz,
she interpreted. She switched back to the feed arriving from Mike’s helmet camera, giving a point of view shot from the interior of the Lander. Wow, she thought to herself. Could he have crammed any more crap into that little thing? She then switched the long camera view from the satellite to appear on the big screen, replacing the boring view of the interior of the Lander.

She saw the parachute canopies jettisoned on the big screen and turned her head slightly to focus on her smaller screens in front of her. Shortly after that, the second RAD assembly fired. After that assembly was depleted and jettisoned, she put the image from the outboard camera up on the big screen. There was a chorus of “ooos” from around the room. There was a clear shot of the Martian surface rushing towards the camera that lasted for moments before the flare of the final RAD assembly. She looked over her shoulder and Hans gave a slight nod.

Arno leaned in and was using the station to modify the long shots from the Mar-Sat. She leaned a bit sideways to let him do this and then nudged him. They both watched the engine flaring out as the downward movement stopped. The long shots confirmed it, Mike was on Mars! With the final engine cut-off a roar of cheering, backslapping, and general carrying-on occurred, lasting almost a full minute. They all settled down to their stations after that, there was much to do, and more celebrating would begin shortly. The bubbly was on ice, caterers were making final preparations in the large conference room, and the media gallery was jammed. The inevitable celebration party was in a programmed hold and ready to blast off when given the word.

Arno had reached over Carrie and changed the outboard view back to the Landers’ internal view. They saw Mike standing up with his hand against the wall. He was bouncing up and down a bit, obviously getting his sea legs back after so long in zero-g. Had he been on Earth, he would not have been able to stand so quickly, but the low-g of Mars made it basically, a non-issue; or at least, not much of an issue. Of course, the three hours of daily strength training while he had been in transit had benefited him greatly.

Carrie didn’t have much to do at this point. Her sole area of concern for the evening was on the video feed, which due to the DSP innovations by NEC Laboratories made her job easier. The video arrived with only a fifteen second lag behind the digital telemetry feeds.

While the Mar-Sat upclose image filled one screen, most people were watching Mike on the other. Carrie and Arno both leaned forward at the same time with furrowed brows. They looked at each other and looked back at the feed. They had both seen the shadow pass over the Lander and the ground near it, transiting basically Martian west to east. They couldn’t figure out anything that would have caused it at first glance. They had seen the parachutes jettisoned farther down field. Carrie noticed a small point of shimmering distortion on the screen and started to work at clearing it up, but then it disappeared. At the same time, they both came up with the thought that it was probably a weather anomaly. Arno stood up to look at the meteorology station directly in front of them. It showed clear skies, and no clouds in the landing area; winds were at norm, and the Mars local temperature was holding steady at -23 degrees Celsius. The Mar-Sat long shots didn’t show any clouds either. Carrie was about to pull up the record of the second longer shot from Mar-Sat to review it when they heard Mike’s voice over the loudspeaker in the room.

“Hello Earth! This is Mike Lane reporting to you from Mars …” Carrie made a quick feed adjustment, and then they both looked up and watched the helmet cam feed of Mike in the airlock giving what would be a much replayed speech. This was a historic moment; the playback could wait a few minutes. Shortly after Mike’s speech began, a bunch of techs on the other side of the room started talking rapidly, Carrie and Arno looked over as one of them put both of his hands up in the air and turned towards Hans, “Herr Gohs, we’ve lost all telemetry from the Lander.”

“What do you mean lost telemetry?”

“I mean we are not getting …” The room turned orange, then yellow, then white, with the brilliance of the silent explosion on the large screen at the front of the room. Everyone looked at where the Lander had been, now it was just a fireball and mushroom cloud of smoke forming as the ejecta of debris spewed upwards from around what would come to be known as “Cortés Crater”.

The smoke cleared quickly and the flames were rapidly dying out. Martian atmo was not conducive to fire. There simply wasn’t enough oxygen in the Martian atmosphere to sustain it. Fire requires three things, fuel, oxygen, and heat to be sustained. While it had fuel (there was still some rocket fuel and vapours in the third RAD assembly attached to the ship), and the burning was indeed with enough heat, the lack of oxygen in the atmosphere meant the fires did not last long. While man had figured out how to extract oxygen from CO2, fire could not do it on its own. It would seem that as an act of contrition by nature, the black smoke from the smoldering debris did last a very long time. The mushroom cloud of smoke quickly dissipated, and they saw that what had once been the Lander, was now a gritty red field of alien regolith strewn with chunks of twisted, burning, and smoking debris around a blackened depression. Arno made the satellite camera zoom in closer on the site of the explosion. They watched silently as a green-and-white baseball cap (one of the Swedish bandy team caps, Hammarby from Stockholm), untouched by flame or soot, was blown across the debris field. It was blowing end over end, drunkenly. Carrie felt her heart ache. It was the baseball cap that her oldest son, Hindrik, had given Mike the last time he had spent the weekend; the weekend he took her boys to see the ball club play. That was a year ago. She fought back the tears that burned like it had been yesterday. There were a few large chunks of twisted metal that hadn’t been thrown far, and they watched as everything that had gone up, was now coming back down close to the explosion site. Spinning Wheel; cue Blood, Sweat & Tears.

The room stayed silent for a long time. You could have heard a snowflake drop, it was that quiet. Someone eventually gasped and started sobbing. There was a lot of breath holding that got let out at the same time. Almost on cue, the place broke out in pandemonium and everyone started shouting at once. Hans was shouting orders, most of them at Arno and Carrie to start with, before he started moving on to the techs that had raised the concern about no-telemetry. Uplinks from the Habitats and the AtmoGen were all transmitting properly and completely. The rover signals and video feeds were all working fine, uplinked through the W-Hab. Medical had zero telemetry from Mike himself, however that data stream would have been uplinked through the now non-existent Lander antenna array. There was no signal degradation from the Mar-Sat. A mousey little man in the far front corner of the room did a discrete check on the Jalopy-Sat signal which was also strong and without interference. He looked up, caught Hans’ eye, then raised his hands palm up and shrugged his shoulders at what had happened.

Arno responded to Hans’ request on the video feeds, while Carrie took over one monitor for herself. She had pulled out the secondary keyboard and was now working in a separate system from Arno. As Arno was playing back the imagery of the explosion for the room, he nudged Carrie with his elbow, “Did you see that dull flash just before the explosion?” he almost whispered.

“That’s what I’m looking for”, she replied under her breath.

An infinitesimally short moment before the big explosion, both Carrie and Arno had seen a twinkling of light on one of the RAD fuel tanks (the outboard auxiliary tank), via the close-up from the Mar-Sat. Hans had seen it too, but it barely registered when the big explosion had hit. He just thought it was part of it the big explosion. It was part of it, in fact, it was the trigger. Both Arno and Carrie new something wasn’t right, but they had to be careful about what they said and had to be absolutely sure. If they ran off half-cocked saying that they had seen the reflection of an energy beam, they would be jobless. The meaning of saying such a thing would be both shattering and catastrophic, with world-wide implications, if it were true. They both had completely forgotten about the shadow and the distortion they saw a few minutes earlier.