The Martian Race (16 page)

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.

Although they had trained in the Devon Island arctic base, there it was only the cold you had to defend against. A wrap of wool across the face had protected Shackleton, Amundsen, Peary and the other crazy pole seekers of a century ago. And their technology had been barely sufficient to shield them against even the one peril. Plenty of frozen bodies at both ends of the Earth. With the new fabrics—warm, lightweight, basically self-regulating to release excess moisture—you really only had to be careful for your nose and lungs.

Not until Everest were the twin threats of cold and airlessness combined. The lethal zone, they called the upper reaches of the mountain, where even the best prepared ventured at extreme risk, losing brain cells to anoxia and becoming weaker by the day.
This whole planet is a lethal zone.

Sitting here in the hab, a mug of tea in her hand, in comfortable sweats, it seemed safe enough. But they never forgot that outside Mars waited, implacably hostile. Not a bad place, just not one tailored for humans.

Sometimes, in her dreams, she imagined there was something, an unseen terror, lurking just outside her door. If she stepped out unprepared, she would be lost. Rationally, she knew it was just anxiety over having to be constantly prepared that gave her the dreams—but the afterimage remained.

Living on Mars was really more like living in the wet ocean, ironically, than at dry and cold Devon Island. That joint NASA/Mars Society facility had been built just about the turn of the millennium to prepare for a manned mission to Mars. There they were drilled into the habit of always suiting up by the numbers before going outside, going through an internal checklist of necessary gear. This amused the permanently Earthbound staff, some of whom had become quite cold-tolerant, and dashed between buildings in indoor wear.

But Julia had never become accustomed to that first great shock of cold air when she went outside. Ironically, on Mars, so much colder than the arctic, they never felt it. You'd have to be suicidal, or crazy, to step outside without a pressure suit and helmet. Best estimates were that you could survive less than thirty seconds.

So, on cold, dry Mars, like divers they checked and rechecked air tanks and connectors, heaters and sensors—their own and those of the ever-present buddy.

And they watched each other's backs. Always. And so they had survived a year and a half.

The liftoff test came after two days of hard labor.

They had been burning methane with oxygen in the rovers for over 500 days. But that was with carbon dioxide to keep the reaction heat down, acting like an inert buffer much as nitrogen did in the air of Earth. The ERV boosters would burn at a far higher temperature. The many engineering tests said the system would withstand that, but those were all done in comfortable labs on Earth. The test ERV had not been sitting on cold, dusty Mars for four years. And did not involve a system that had ruptured on landing. Or one that Raoul had labored month after month to fix. His extensive labors had hampered the exploration, casting a shadow over their long months here.

They'd debated doing just an engine test, maybe even a partial pressurization.

“Maybe we should just warm it up this time,” said Marc.

“You mean do the test in steps?” Raoul looked worn and tired from the accumulated tension.

“So why do test at all?” Viktor's voice had an edge that they all knew by now meant he was keeping his feelings under control. “It works, it doesn't work. We should find out as soon as possible.”

“It might be safer,” said Marc.

“Partial test is only useful if it
doesn't
work.” Viktor's finger jabbed the air, though careful not to point at anyone. He needed to express himself but had learned to not irk others at the same time.

Marc said, “If you lift off and come down wrong, maybe the wind blows you some—”

“Weather is calm. And I know how to fly straight up.”

Marc nodded. Julia said carefully, “The logic seems compelling.”

“Yeah, if we test-fire it too many times we risk other problems,” said Raoul. “Can't beat the devil.”

The men looked at each other. Somehow this had turned into a minor challenge-response between the three, leaving her out of it. At times like this, when the technical expertise was wholly outside her realm, they treated her like Mrs. Viktor.

“We go for it?” Viktor insisted.

The others nodded.

A warning call from Raoul made her crouch down.

They had decided to limit this test at ten percent of max liftoff, enough to see if anything blew a pipe. Just in case, it would have only Raoul and Viktor aboard. Viktor could run the subsystems fine from his couch. Julia also suspected he and Raoul didn't want any distractions.

She and Marc took shelter a few hundred meters away, ready to help if something horrible happened. The stubby Return Vehicle stood with its chem systems detached and gear dragged away, looking a bit naked against pink soil as thoroughly trod as Central Park in Manhattan, but with more litter.

She and Marc had nothing to do but pace to discharge all their adrenaline. The damned cold came through her boots as always and she stamped them to keep the circulation going. Even the best of insulation and boot heaters couldn't keep the chill from penetrating through the soles. It was early morning, so they would have a full day of sunlight to make repairs. If necessary.

She seldom came out this early into the biting hard cold left over from the night. Quickly enough they had learned the pains of even standing in shadow, much less of Martian night—skin stuck to boot tabs, frostbite straight through the insulation. Raoul's limp resulted from severely frostbitten toes after hours of making repairs in the shadow of the Return Vehicle.

He had said he hadn't noticed the chill. That meant he got involved tinkering and shut off those alarms in his mind. They were all focused, semiobsessive types, big on getting details right, or else they would never have been chosen to come.

She closed her eyes, trying to relax. They were about to land on Mars for the second and last time, after a trip of only a few meters or so, think of it that way.

Such odd ways of taking each moment, relieving it of its obvious heart-thudding qualities, had sustained her through the launch from Earth and their aerobraking. Months of tedious mission protocols and psychological seminars had given her many oblique skills.

“Ready,” she heard Raoul through the suit comm. “Starting the pumps.”

Viktor responded with pressure readings, flow rates. She saw a thin fog form beneath the rocket nozzle, like the vapors that sometimes leaked from the soil as the sun first struck it.

More cross talk between the pilots. Their close camaraderie had been so intensive the past few days that she and Marc felt like invisible nonentities, mere “field science” witnesses to the unblinking concentration of the “mission techs,” as the terminology went. Then Raoul said, almost in a whisper, “Let's lift.”

A fog blossomed at the Return Vehicle base. No gantry here, nothing to restrain it: the conical ship teetered a bit, then rose.

“Nice throttling!” Marc called.

“Wheeeee!” Julia cheered.

The ship rose twenty meters, hung—then started falling. A big plume rushed out the side of the ship.

Crump!
came to her through the thin atmosphere.

A panel blew away, tumbling. The ship fell, caught itself, fell another few meters—and smacked down.

“All off!” Raoul called.

“Pressures down,” Viktor answered, voice as mild as ever.

“My God, what—?”

Then she started running. Not that there was anything she could do, really.

PART II

A MARTIAN ODYSSEY

12

JANUARY 14, 2018

A
T LEAST THE DAMAGE WAS CLEAR.
B
RUTALLY.
T
HE PANEL HAD PEELED
off about a meter above the reaction chamber. Inside they could see a mass of popped valves, ruptured pumps, and tangled lines.

“Damn, I built those to take three times the demand load,” Raoul said.

“Something surged,” Viktor said. “Readout shows that.”

“Still, the system should have held,” Raoul insisted, face dark. “The seals must've leaked.”

“Overpressure was probably from double line we made,” Viktor said mildly.

“Ummm.” Raoul bit his lip. Julia could see his pale face through his helmet viewer and wondered if he felt defeated. He was looking intently at the ruined assembly. “There seems to be a stain
inside
… dust! There's dust inside the line!” He turned to Viktor, “It's the seals all right, and having two lines made it just that much worse—twice as many seals.” Then he nodded briskly. “That's it, all right. We should check with the desk guys, see if anything else showed up during their test fire, but I'll bet that's it.”

“Double line was their idea.”

“Right. We'll go back to the original design.”

Somehow this buoyed them. It had to, she reflected. Either they got the system working or they wouldn't dare lift. The Airbus crew would have to rescue them—a huge
maybe
—getting the glory and the $30 billion.

“Should I contact Ground Control now, or wait until we get back to the hab?” Marc asked.

“They control nothing,” Raoul said. “We're in control.”

“Is damned right,” Viktor said, laughing in a dry way.

“Okay.” Julia grinned uncertainly and Marc followed suit.

“I suppose we should wait, talk to Earthside before we pull anything out and start refitting,” Raoul said.

Viktor's voice crackled in the suit radio, his accent more noticeable, “Nyet, nyet, no waiting. You go ahead. Can't sit here and wait for Airbus to take us home.”

As they were cleaning up and preparing lunch, a chime announced that a priority vid had arrived. Julia knew it was from Axelrod, as usual catching them together at a mealtime. By consensus looks they agreed to wait until later to review it. Axelrod's messages were usually harangues—as Marc put it, “The latest bee up his ass.” And today was going to be epic because he had seen the failure, heard their reports.