The Attempt (The Martian Manifesto Book 1) (23 page)

Aboard the Chinese Moon ship, Li Julong had stopped struggling against his restraints. He realized that it was useless. The Americans would receive no help as long as Sergeant Wong was in charge. Their fate was now solely in their own hands.

As he looked out the porthole, the chief scientist could not help but admire what he had accomplished. By launching so much fuel from the Moon, they had not only reached Mars in record time, but could burn enough to leisurely enter the thin atmosphere and softly land. There was no need for them to perform all the tests that NASA had done to deploy parachutes at hyper velocities to slow down or winged craft like the one that was attempting to land currently. His team had not spent years testing how to handle firing retrorockets at supersonic speeds as a ship entered the Martian atmosphere. NASA's Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) technology demonstration missions had consumed years of manpower and huge amounts of their budget in order to allow the various American ships and supplies to safely descend to Mars.

With all the fuel at their disposal, the Chinese ship had simply fired long
enough to slow down so that it could enter the Martian atmosphere at subsonic speeds and descend on a long tail of flame. As Li Julong looked out the window, he imagined what someone would see from the ground. It would look like many of those old Hollywood movies he had watched as a child, where a long skinny craft with fins slowly descended and touched down on its tail. He chuckled as he imagined himself in a bulbous suit climbing down a long ladder and confronting a surprised Martian.

He hoped that the Americans and his own people were wrong
about the alien presence, and that it would be a peaceful start to an amazing journey of discovery. He closed his eyes and uttered a sigh as he felt the ship gently touch down on the red planet. Out the porthole, as the dust settled, he could see the long low profile of the three never used Mars One habitats that they were to restore. Soon, he imagined, he might be called upon to do much more than restoration, and things that were against his very nature.

# # #

“Sergey, where’s that radar?” Sam urgently asked through the ship’s radio. “We need it like yesterday.”

“It should be … there, it is active!”
she heard the Russian exclaim through the speaker.

On the ship
’s console, the radar display suddenly lit up. It showed Mars as a curve along the bottom of the screen. Above it was a green line going horizontally from right to left, ending in an ‘X’ which was the Pegasus. To the left, the projected trajectory in red showed them hurtling straight across Mars and off into space.

“We’re too high and
too fast!” Sam shouted. “We need to go down! Push forward!”

“
No, I’ve been here before,” Roy said calmly. “Use the bottom thrusters to lean the ship back more—five degrees.”

“
Back?! But we need to go down!”

“Trust
me; we have to do the opposite of our natural reactions since we are more like a meteor than a plane. Fire the bottom nose thrusters to tilt us further,” Roy repeated.

“I sure hope you know what you’re doing,” Sam said as
she complied with the Commander’s order.

As Sam initiated them, t
he ignited thrusters pushed the nose further back so that the Pegasus was now facing slightly past vertical. As the wind pushed against the angled bottom of the ship, more of it followed the path of least resistance and flowed up and over the nose, forcing the ship into an ever increasing downward trajectory.

“Hey, it worked,” Sam said. “The projected trajectory
on the display is starting to curve down.” She then looked at the other dashboard readings. “Uh oh, the bottom rear of the ship is heating up. It’s at ninety-five percent of max. The temperature’s redlining there now!”

“How’s the trajectory?” Roy grunted.

“Not enough. It only looks like orbit. Rear temps are five percent over redline!”

“Alright, we don’t have any choice. Fire the top nose thrusters to get us back to vertical.”

As Sam was initiating the top thrusters, both astronauts were unaware of what was occurring in the rear of the ship. Although the engineers who had designed the ship had built well, none had foreseen someone diving the Pegasus rear first through the Martian atmosphere, and had never included the ramifications in the simulations that Roy had finally beaten. The heat of passage started to work its way up the back of the ship and into the nacelles surrounding the rockets, melting the tubing and stressing the nozzles. One of the bells cracked, and then tore asunder.

Bang!

With a tremendous shudder, Sam and Roy felt the nose of the ship drop forward. The disintegration of the rocket nozzle had increased the drag of the bottom rear tremendously.

“What the hell?” Sam exclaimed
. The view out the front had shifted, and she could see they were now headed down towards Mars. She glanced at the gauges. “Trajectory has us impacting on the surface! Nose temps now redlining again!”

“Pull back and add bottom thrusters!” Roy cried. “We have to get back to vertical!”

As Sam and Roy struggled to regain control of their ship, many of the Called in the rear of the craft screamed. Some just gripped their armrests and closed their eyes. Some prayed to the Great Consciousness. Bonnie looked down at the front of her shift. Just as the Pegasus had not been designed to take the stresses it was being subjected to, so also the female uterus while eight months pregnant was not designed to be banged around at multiple G’s. Bonnie let out her own scream as she felt a tearing across her whole midsection and back. With horror she saw that her dress was covered in blood.

After landing the Chinese ship, Sergeant Wong had commanded the ten North Koreans to deploy in a circle around the landing site with their guns at the ready. “We must maintain military discipline at all times,” he had told them. “You never know when you are about to be attacked.”

Li Julong, who was to be the last to descend the ladder, heard the NCO cursing his charges. “Get up, get up!” the NCO shouted.

Julong, having been freed from his restraints, went over and looked out of the hatch. He could see that many of the men were slipping and falling. The entire base of the ship was a sheet of ice!
“Of course,”
he thought.
“The Mars One colony ships had been sent to a location suspected of much subsurface ice so that they could mine it for water and oxygen. Our descent engines must have blown the surface soil away.”

Once the NCO had restored order, he
dispatched three of the men to check the habitats. As Li Julong descended the ladder, he heard one of the men report back through the radios that the habitats were completely without power.

When the chief scientist reached the surface, he turned around and
looked at what was to be their new home. In front of him were three cone shaped structures placed next to each other with a corridor connecting each of them in a straight line. Each module also had a small ladder leading up to a door in the middle of the cone. A bulldozer was nearby, as well as two small rovers that could hold a few people each. It appeared that the bulldozer had been mounding up dirt as radiation shielding for the habitats, since the module on the right had a pile of Martian soil pushed up against and over it. The other two habitats were uncovered. To the left of the habitats was a small field of solar arrays for power.

“L
ao Li, why is there no power to the habitats?” the NCO barked.

The scientist felt like saying,
“How should I know since I only just stepped out of our ship.”
Instead he replied, “Let me go and check the solar array. That would be the logical starting point.”

“Be quick about it,” the sergeant huffed. “We need to establish our base quickly and go to the coordinates we pilfered from the NASA computers. We must be the first there to retrieve any alien artifacts.”

Julong carefully approached the solar panels. He could see that something had happened to them. When he stopped at the nearest one, he could tell that it was smashed and that the main power cable connecting the array to the habitats had come loose. On closer inspection, he noticed a small baseball sized meteorite sitting in a concave depression underneath the panel.
“What bad luck,”
he thought.
“This hit right at the one critical spot where the cable was attached to the panels. They couldn’t fix this by remote control from Earth once they lost all power.”
Aloud he said, “Sergeant Wong, it appears that the power cable is disconnected. Have someone get me my tools. I should be able to reattach it quickly and then be able to check out the habitat systems. Meanwhile, it might be best to have some of our people start moving additional dirt over all the habitats for shielding and others moving supplies into the habitats.”

Soon he was at work reconfiguring the solar panels to bypass the broken one and reattaching the cable to restore power. Behind him was a beehive of activity as the others moved dirt
to cover the ice so that they would no longer slip, and then started unloading the supplies.

# # #

“Down a bit. Up a bit. That’s it; hold it right there,” Sam exhorted. “Whatever that bang was, our trajectory is stabilizing now.”

Roy glanced over at the gauges in front of his fellow astronaut
as the bucking of the Pegasus slowed and then ceased. He could see that the temperature readings were holding steady and the G’s were coming down once more. The trajectory plot showed them curving higher over Mars and then descending to the surface into a perfect skip reentry! “Ha, I told you we could do it,” he said to Sam.

“Yeah, well, you know how
some pilots say that they’ve flown so high that they could hear the angels sing? For sure I heard them calling to me a minute ago! I think I heard the trumpets at the pearly gates too.”

“
I hope you told them that they can’t have us yet! How’s the fuel on the nose thrusters?”

“It looks like we’re down to two percent, which is going to make it a
pretty rough final entry. We’ll need to use this same trick with the ailerons in test mode to slow down enough to land.” As she looked at the projected trajectory on her display, Sam said, “Coming up on the apex of our arc.”

“Good. Let them know in the back not to get up, as
this is a temporary respite and it’s going to get rough again.”

Sam turned on the rear cabin speaker.
She was totally angry at the situation the leader of the group had put everyone in. “People, I am only going to say this once. If you know what’s good for you, stay in your seats,” she admonished. “We’ll be landing in about five minutes, and it’s going to be very rough. When I tell you all to brace, lean forward and put your arms over your heads. It’s not going to be pretty.”

When old Sue heard the announcement, she turned around to see how Bonnie was doing.
She saw that her friend was slumped forward with blood covering her torso. “Oh dear,” she cried. “Help,” she shouted. “Bonnie needs help!” She unbuckled her harness and started to climb over her seat back.

“No,
stop,” Brother Jacobs said, turning around in his seat. “We are in the hands of the Great Consciousness. Stay seated and have faith.”

Jeff, who was sitting next to Brother Jacobs in the front, started to unbuckle his restraints, but Brother Jacobs grabbed his hand. “Have faith, Platinum One. What will be, will be.” Jeff stopped and
re-buckled his seat belt.

“That’s right, listen to Brother Jacobs
,” Celia added from her seat. “Sister Sue, I think you are losing your faith from having associated with Bonnie and her offspring for too long. You saw how her daughter tried to defy our leader earlier. Now you’re doing the same thing. Sit down!”

“Well, the hell with you!” Sue exclaimed. “I’m helping Bonnie no matter what
any of you say.” Sue scurried over her seat and landed next to Bonnie. As she unbuckled her friend, she reached under Bonnie’s armpits. “Here, let’s get you up and onto the floor,” she told her. “We’ll use the seat cushions to protect you.”

As Bonnie rose up and struggled to get into the aisle, Sue grabbed the seat cushion and ripped it up. Then she reached over and did the same with her seat that she had vacated. She threw both of the cushions into the aisle, and the
n rushed over to help Bonnie lie down upon them.

“This is bad, Sue,” Bonnie groaned, gripping her friends hand. “I’ve never felt pain like this with my other two.” She groaned again as she felt a contraction. “I think the baby’s coming.”

“Okay, just breathe,” Sue said. “And push.”

Bonnie pushed, and screamed.

# # #

Up front,
on the Pegasus flight deck, Roy and Sam were unaware of the commotion behind them in the main cabin. Sam had turned off the rear cabin intercom in disgust. “Whatever happens back there is probably deserved by most of them since they blindly obeyed that idiot leader,” she said to Roy.

“We don’t have time for that,” Roy replied. “We need to focus
on this last critical section of our reentry into the Martian atmosphere. Get us into the proper descent angle.”

Sam fired the nose thrusters to place the Pegasus in the exact position for reentry, with its nose
tilted up at forty degrees. The fuel status indicator lights turned red. “That’s it, Roy. We’re out of fuel on the thrusters now. We’ll need to hold this angle using only the ailerons.”

“Roger that. H
ow’s our projected trajectory? Are we going to make it close to the supply ships?”

“We’re right on target according to the display,” Sam said.  “Temperature’s starting to climb on all the surfaces. Nose is dropping to thirty-eight degrees.”

“Pull up a bit. We must be getting some extra drag in the rear.”

As Sam complied,
she kept reading off the gauges. “Up to one G. Two G’s. Nose dropping again! We have to pull up more!”

The Pegasus wobbled left and right as the two astronauts struggled to move their ailerons in synch. Sam saw a piece of tiling fly
off from the outer leading edge of the wing on her side. “Roy, we just lost a piece of the heat tiling on my wing,” she exclaimed.

In the rear cabin,
as the ship bucked and wobbled, Sue and Bonnie slid the whole length of the aisle and slammed into the front bulkhead. Sue’s head careened off the wall and Bonnie’s legs slammed into her stomach. Bonnie saw stars as her head hit the floor, and the starburst clouded her vision.

Sue struggled to r
ise under the weight of the ship’s deceleration, but couldn’t. She crawled over next to Bonnie and held her hand. “Hold on, Bonnie. Just…hold on.” Now that they were at the front of the aisle, Sue looked over at Jeff and Brother Jacobs. “Won’t either of you help?” she asked. She got no response from them. All they did was stare at Bonnie, who looked back at them with despair. The two people that she had come to rely upon just sat immobile, clutching their armrests.

Up front, Roy and Sam managed to stabilize the Pegasus.
“How are we doing on the trajectory?” Roy queried.

“It looks like we’
re through maximum heating. We should start leveling out now.”

Both astronauts moved their controls and the Pegasus nose descended so that it was now at twenty degrees nose up. It was becoming less of a meteor and more of an airplane.

“
We should start to …”

As Sam was talking, the temperature
spiked in the outer wing on her side. Between the battering of the skip maneuver and the loss of the heat tiles, the outer one-quarter of the wing on Sam’s side broke off and spun away. What remained of the wing dropped as it lost lift, threatening to put the Pegasus into a roll and then spin. Sam jammed her control column forward so that the aileron went down, attempting to provide extra lift to the wing by making it more curved.

# # #

Li Julong had just finished making repairs to the solar array when he saw them flutter slightly.
“That’s weird,”
he thought. Then, a streak passed over his head. He looked up and saw a meteor hurtling through the thin Martian atmosphere. A piece of it had broken off and was leaving a fiery trail behind the main body.

His scientific mind instantly made the connection. “Oh,
that must have caused a small sonic boom that caused the solar panels to vibrate!” he muttered. He put the meteor out of his mind as he tried to calculate how a sonic boom would travel through the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. Lost in thought as he performed some calculations, he did not notice the meteor curve slightly to the right, which is something no normal meteor would have done.

# # #

The three astronauts who had deployed the radar array to help guide the Pegasus could only wait helplessly on the Martian surface. They could accomplish nothing more until the ship arrived, either in one piece or many. They anxiously scanned the sky in front of them, hoping to spot the Pegasus.

“Hey, I see them!”
Brad yelled. “But, why are they veering off?”

# # #

“Roy, you need to drop the wing on your side,” Sam yelled as the Pegasus threatened to pitch further to the right.

Roy jammed his controls back and
succeeded in almost leveling the craft. The drag on the right wing meant that the Pegasus was now in a very slow turn to the right. “What happened?” he asked Sam.

“We
lost part of the wing on my side. I’ve got my aileron at its maximum extension down. I can’t afford to move it or I might stall the wing. Can you drop your wing further to get us pointed back at the landing site? We’re heading off at an angle and will miss by a number of kilometers.”

“It won’t go any further. We’ll have to wait until we’re abreast the landing zone, and
I’ll ease up on my side and we’ll do a 270 degree turn to the right and come in from the side.”

“C’mon baby, hold together one more minute,” Sam muttered as the ship descended towards the ground. “Roy, if we
make it through this, I want my nickname to be Andromeda,” she said.

Instantly making the connection, Roy said,
“Um, wasn’t it Bellerophon who rode Pegasus to kill the Chimera?”

“Yes
, but then he fell off trying to fly to Mount Olympus. Perseus also rode Pegasus, and he had no problems. I know we’re going to make it, and so I’m going with the whole Pegasus, Perseus and Andromeda mythos from now on.”

“Right, suit yourself. Starting our 270 degree turn now,” Roy said as he eased up the pressure on his control column. The ship started a slow turn to the right, continuing its descent to the ground. “I’m going to open the landing gear doors as soon as we line up,” he said.

“No, don’t do that!” Sam shouted. “I can feel that this wing is barely flying. If we drop the skids, the increased drag may just make it stall or give way. We have to belly land.”