Rescue Mode - eARC (29 page)

“Look at Mars,” Amanda breathed. “It’s so beautiful.”

Benson’s voice suddenly boomed in their earphones. “Ted, do you copy?”

“Bee, we can hear you fine. Not a good time for a chat, though: I’ve just cleared the break and we’re about to dock at the payload module.”

But Benson continued, “They’ve just put two and two together down in Houston and the shit is about to hit the fan. For now I think we can talk freely, since our cross-talk isn’t automatically forwarded back home. But once we get home and they review everything, the brass will know that I didn’t try to stop you.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a long time from now, Bee. And besides, the logs will show that you really didn’t have a choice. If we didn’t do this, the
Arrow
would become a ghost ship for sure.”

As he spoke, Connover touched the forward thruster control to slow their speed as they approached the payload module.

After a moment’s pause, Benson said, “Then let the log also show, for the record, that I think you guys are heroes and that I look forward to hearing all about your stint on Mars, first hand, when you return home. I plan to be there to greet you.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” said Connover. “And, Bee, one more thing.”

“Name it.”

“Make arrangements for there to be flowers on Vicki and Thad’s graves at the first of every month until I get back. Okay?”

“Deal. And good luck on Mars.”

November 5, 2035

16:24 Universal Time

Mars Arrival Plus 10 Days

Mars Lander
Hercules

“Why’d they name this bucket
Hercules
?” Amanda Lynn asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Looks more like a ninety-eight pound weakling to me.”

The four of them were hovering just inside the payload module’s airlock hatch, still in their EVA suits, even though the module was pressurized. A row of overhead lights lit the cavernous area dimly.

It’s like being inside the belly of a whale,
Connover thought. And in its middle sat the
Hercules
. The lander looked spindly, like a child’s toy.

The bird was simple and functional, not designed for long-duration flight, but for the quick missions from orbit to the ground and back again. Its forward end was a blunt heat shield, from its rear hung a rocket nozzle. Not much in between: a tubular windowless fuselage with bulges forward that contained the parachute packs.

The Martian atmosphere was thinner than Earth’s high stratosphere, but it was still dense enough to burn the ship like a meteor if they came in at the wrong angle.

Weightlessly they glided to the lander. Ted undogged its airlock hatch and one by one they entered the
Hercules
. Its interior was simple, Spartan, functional. Cockpit and seven seats behind the pilot. Big empty cargo hold, which they would fill with water from the
Fermi
habitat, waiting for them on the surface. And storage lockers for the rocks and soil samples the explorers would want to bring back with them.

No bunks, no privacy quarters, only one minimal lavatory. Once on the surface they would live inside the habitat.

Ted had thoroughly checked out the lander over the past two days, while Hi and Catherine carried in the food rations they would need during their extended stay on the surface and stored them in the cargo bay’s lockers. To his enormous relief he had found that the
Hercules
had not been damaged at all by the meteoroid hit; it was ready for flight.

As the four of them settled themselves in the cockpit, Ted powered up the ship’s electrical system, then pressurized the interior with air from the tanks resting beneath the floorboards.

“You can take off your helmets now,” he told his teammates. Then he added, “But keep them within arm’s reach, just in case.”

As he unfastened his own helmet, Ted looked over his shoulder and saw that Amanda was cradling her helmet in her lap. He grinned at her. “Taking no chances, huh, Mandy?”

“None that I don’t have to take,” she replied.

Placing his own helmet between his booted feet, Ted started the preflight checkout. “We’ll be departing the
Arrow
in two hours,” he told them. “We’ll be in a powered descent, and the ride will get a little rough when we bite into the atmosphere. But it’s only a short ride. Once we undock and get clear of the
Arrow
, we should be on the ground in seven minutes.”

“Just get us down in one piece,” McPherson said, with some fervor.

Ted nodded and suppressed an urge to admit to them that the flight was known among the engineers who had planned it out as “seven minutes of terror.”

Instead, he called Bee, in the
Arrow
’s command center.

“I’m ready to unlatch the CTV.”

“Copy CTV unlatch,” Benson’s voice replied.

“Unlatched,” said Connover. “She’s all yours now, Bee.”

“Right. I have control of the CTV. Autopilot is engaged.”

They heard a small thud. Ted called up the view from the
Arrow
’s external cameras and saw, on his control panel’s screen, the crew transfer vehicle slowly moving away from the payload module.

“You’ve got her, Bee.”

“No, the computer has her. I’m just here as a backup, in case the computer has a problem.”

“Feeling redundant, are we?” Ted joked.

“Sort of. But that too shall pass. I’ve got to get this crew home safely. I’ll have time to worry about being redundant later.”

Ted looked up and saw through the overhead window that the payload module was splitting in two, as if some gargantuan surgeon were cutting open the belly of the whale. Uncounted stars stared down at him, hard and unblinking.
Where’s Mars?
he wondered, forcing down a sudden wave of fear.

As they felt the bumps and thumps of their disconnect from the payload module restraints, Ted rehearsed in his mind the steps that the ship would have to go through. Seven minutes of terror.

Once they floated free of the
Arrow
, the lander’s chemical rockets would have to fire to reduce their orbital speed and let them descend into the Martian atmosphere and not drop like a rock toward the surface of the planet. Friction from the thin air would slow them quickly; then they would deploy the high-altitude parachutes to slow their descent further.

That’s where the greatest uncertainty lay. If the upper atmospheric winds were too strong they might find themselves coming down much farther from the habitat than they had planned. Same thing if the winds were weaker than predicted. It would be up to him, Ted knew, to make last-minute corrections in the ship’s course before they jettisoned the chutes and started the final descent, using the rocket engines. It was his responsibility to use the main rocket engine to hover momentarily and correct for any trajectory errors.

“Starting retroburn,” he announced. Then he added to the three behind him, “Hold onto your hats.”

They felt a brief surge of acceleration pushing gently against them.

“Retroburn complete,” Connover reported.

“Copy retroburn complete,” came Benson’s voice. “Have a pleasant flight.”

“Thanks.”

The lander began to buck and shudder. “All normal,” Ted shouted to his companions, over the growing wail of the wind.

The wind outside was screeching like a wailing banshee. The lander’s vibrations peaked, then began to ease away.

A thump as the parachutes popped out of their containers and then a big lurch when they filled. Ted heard grunts and groans behind him.

“We’re not slowing much!” McPherson said.

“Enough,” Ted replied, his eyes on the trajectory trace displayed on his main screen.

Then he looked up and saw, through the overhead window, the three big, beautiful parachutes billowing brilliant white against the auburn Martian sky.
Good chutes
, he said to himself.
Gorgeous chutes.

But one of the parachutes started fluttering and folding up on itself.

Ted immediately took the ship off autopilot and grabbed the tiny control yoke. He thumbed the buttons on the yoke that would fire the attitude control thrusters. The lander tilted awkwardly and began swaying like a pendulum.

Bang—Bang—Bang.
Ted fired the thrusters to get the ship in the upright attitude they needed to land properly. Otherwise the lander would hit the ground at an angle and the landing gear would collapse under them.

Ted’s eyes were riveted on the navigation screen, next to the countdown clock. The pendulum swing was slowing noticeably and the nav graph was showing green again. The clock was counting down the time to estimated touchdown.

“Gonna be a hard landing,” Ted told his teammates. “Hang on.”

The primary rocket engine ignited again and they were pushed into their seats.

“Touchdown in twenty seconds!” he yelled. “Brace for impact!”

WHAM! The
Hercules
slammed into the surface. The shock of the impact caused Ted to bite his tongue, drawing blood. The ship creaked like an old man settling into a chair. Then all sound, all sense of motion, stopped.

“We’re down,” Ted said, wiping sweat from his brow. “Welcome to Mars.”

VI

On
M
ars

November 5, 2035

20:22 Universal Time

Mars Landing

NASA Headquarters

Bart Saxby had sat behind his desk with growing anxiety as he and a handful of aides watched the four crew members suit up and head for the lander.

“Get Brice on the horn,” he growled, rubbing at the smoldering pain in his chest. “Now!”

“But they’re in the middle—”

“Now!” Saxby shouted.

Robin Harkness, the director of human spaceflight, reached for the telephone on Saxby’s desk.

“Won’t he be busy monitoring the lander’s launch?” asked Saxby’s deputy director, a comely middle-aged woman who knew the intricacies of Washington politics better than the engineering of space missions.

“I don’t care if he’s building the Great Wall of China,” Saxby growled. “They’ve torn up the mission protocol and I want to know why.”

Harkness, lean and narrow eyed with suspicion, reported, “Comm director says Brice can’t be disturbed for another five-ten minutes.”

Saxby fought down the urge to explode. Instead, he sat at his desk, his chest burning, and watched the
Arrow
’s external camera view of the
Hercules
lander’s departure from the
Arrow
and its plunge into the Martian atmosphere.

One of the TV screens on Saxby’s office wall was blank, but the voice of Commander Benson was coming from it.

“Copy retroburn complete. Have a pleasant flight.”

The deputy director said, “Have a pleasant flight? He sounds like an airline steward, for God’s sake.”

Grimly, Saxby said, “That’s Benson’s sense of humor.”

“Trajectory looks good,” Benson was saying. “Hey! One of your chutes spilled!”

Saxby squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath.

“Good stuff, Ted. Correction is on the nose.”

He breathed again.

Then Connover’s voice announced, “We’re down. We’re on Mars.”

“Good stuff, Ted,” Benson repeated.

Saxby seethed.

“It looks like four of them went down to the surface,” Harkness said.

“Looks like,” said Saxby.

“That’s not in the mission protocol. They have to clear any protocol changes with Brice.”

“That’s why I’m waiting—”

His desktop phone console buzzed. Saxby snatched up the handset. “Nate! What the hell is going on?”

He punched the speaker button and replaced the handset. Everyone in the office heard Brice’s slightly nasal voice, calm and flat.

“. . . four of them will stay on Mars, Bart. It’s the only way the rest of the crew can get back to Earth alive.”

“Alive!” Saxby snapped. “And what about the four of them on Mars? How long can they last there?”

A heartbeat’s pause. Then, “Until we send the follow-on mission to pick them up.”

As Harkness and the others barked and shouted at Brice, Saxby remembered the letter of resignation he had written when the final propellant stage for the
Arrow
had limped into the wrong orbit, eight days before the crew left Earth orbit and started for Mars.

I’ll have to get it out of the recycle bin before I see the president,
he realized.

It was almost 6:30 p.m. in Washington, the cocktail hour, as Bart Saxby’s limousine pulled up at the White House’s entrance. A pair of stone-faced Marine guards in their olive drab uniforms stood at attention as Sarah Fleming watched Saxby climb out of the limo.

He looks like he’s aged ten years,
Fleming thought as she studied Saxby’s ashen, drawn face.

“Hello, Bart,” she said, extending her hand to him. “The President is waiting to see you.”

“I bet he is,” Saxby said.

She led him down the corridor to the Oval Office in the west wing, past two more security checkpoints. Fleming was in her usual skirted business suit, sky blue; Saxby wore a typical bureaucrat’s dark gray suit—with his resignation letter in its inside jacket pocket.

President Harper was alone in the Oval Office as Saxby and Fleming entered. He got up from behind his desk and gestured the two of them to the little round table in the far corner of the room.

“What happened up there, Bart? First a wedding and now this. The news media is in a feeding frenzy.”

Saxby sat down and admitted, “Mr. President, we have a sort of revolution on our hands.”

Harper’s dark, suspicious eyes focused on him like a pair of lasers. “A revolution?”

Saxby explained Connover’s plan to the president.

“And Benson let him do it?”

Nodding unhappily, Saxby replied, “Both of them have come to the conclusion that the only way to save their lives is keep half the crew on Mars, living in the
Fermi
habitat, while the other half comes back home.”

“The four returning home, they’ll have enough water to make it?”

“Yessir, if Connover and the others can ship it to them on the lander’s ascent stage.”

Frowning slightly, the President asked, “Your flight monitor, what’s his name?”