On Mars Pathfinder (The Mike Lane Stories Book 1)

by Jim Melanson

  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.

  In The Wreckage Of The Airlock

  I groaned as I slowly woke up. I felt like I had been hit by a car. My back hurt, my arms hurt, my legs hurt, my head hurt. The only sound was the hiss of airflow in my helmet, a sound that would be part of my day for the rest of my life, however long or short that was going to be. It was a sound that would come to mean life itself. I was still alive. That was a good thing. I knew coming to Mars that there was the chance I would die on the way or after I got here. I had never said to anyone that all it would mean to me was that I got be with Loreena again, sooner. Ah, well. I was alive. That was a good thing. Obviously the good Lord had a reason to keep me that way.

  There was some light around me but not much, the internal lighting in the airlock wasn’t working. I lay there for a moment and took stock of my body. I was sore, but I didn’t think anything w
as broken. I was breathing okay, which was always a good sign. Slowly lifting my arms, I felt no pain in my ribs or my chest. I ran a diagnostic on my suit systems, everything was fine, and my oxygen tanks were still at 98.4%. I turned on the HUD to keep an eye on system readings, and then turned on the LED area light in my chest plate. It was too bright for the small space so I shut it off again.

  “So what the hell was that?” I asked myself. It had to have been an explosion, duhhh. I was still oriented relatively upright in the airlock but I was lying horizontally on my back. I looked up at the internal airlock hatch which was almost directly above me. There was light coming in through the portal in the hatch, but it looked like it had been mostly blackened out by soot, by something burning. I groaned as I realized this meant I was probably lying on top of the outer airlock hatch. That meant that I could not fire the emergency explosive bolts on the outer hatch to open it, not if it was face down on the Martian ground with the bulk of the airlock on top of it. The blow back would probably finish what the original explosion failed to accomplish, killing me. I was very grateful at that moment that I had depressurized the airlock before whatever happened had happened.

  I surmised that because the airlock was a late addition and reinforced in its construction, this must have kept the airlock mass intact when the explosion happened. I couldn’t tell if the whole Lander was on its side, or if the airlock had come apart from the Lander. However, the sunlight coming through the soot smudged interior airlock portal, almost directly above me, didn’t give me much hope that the Lander was intact. Either way, it was probably not going to be serviceable, in any fashion..

  I looked upwards, but only saw the inside of my helmet. I had to slowly and gingerly re-orient my body and push back on the top of my helmet so that I could look up at what was the actual ceiling of the airlock. There was some light coming through holes in several parts of the ceiling. “Okay, definitely not going to be serviceable,” I muttered to myself.

  I didn’t have any welding equipment big enough to handle ship repairs. The Habitat had a small TIG welder for small repairs to mechanicals and equipment, but it wouldn’t handle this much of a job. Of course, at this point I was still hoping the ship was mostly intact with some holes in it.

  I rocked back and forth a bit, then a bit harder. It seemed prudent to test the stability of the airlock, to see if it would roll; but it wasn’t budging an iota. That’s promising. I gingerly moved so I wasn’t between the wall and transport bags, and tried to stand up. The airlock wasn’t wide enough to allow me to fully stand up though, so I crouched down, resting my butt on one of the transport bags. Reaching above my head, I rotated and pushed hard against the handle on the inner airlock hatch, which was now top-side. It only moved part of the way and then stuck. I pushed hard on the handle, and tried pounding on the hatch with my fist, but it wouldn’t budge. I changed my body’s seated angle a bit, and looked closer at the airlock door. It was deformed slightly. Great. It would never open again, not with what I had at hand to try and force it. The pulse-energy rifles I had put in the airlock just before closing the door would be useless, they didn’t work that way. Using them in such a confined space would probably backfire on me anyways.

  I turned my attention to the “ceiling” of the airlock and the light coming through it in several places. There seemed, oddly enough, to be a bit more light coming through than I had originally noticed. I guess I was adjusting to the gloomy interior of the airlock wreckage. I shuffled around a bit, detached and moved a couple bags, and then braced myself in a semicrouching position with my back against the reorganized cargo. I pulled both feet up as much as I could and kicked hard. The ceiling panel buckled in the middle and moved outward about 10 centimetres. This pulled it away from the sides in a few places and let more light in. I hunkered forward a bit closer and then I kicked again, and then again. I was getting somewhere. I moved myself closer again, drew up my legs, and gave a massive thrust with them. The entire ceiling panel came apart from the airlock and fell forward, very slowly. I looked down through my feet and could see both of the Habitats in the distance. Between the Habs and my position, there was an extensive debris field of smouldering, twisted metal, and other smouldering things. I could see equipment bags half burned, and utility boxes smashed apart; contents bare to the atmosphere.

  “Frak me”

  I collapsed backwards and wanted to cry, part with relief and part with disappointment. Everything had gone so well. So why this? Why did the ship explode? The HUD showed all my suit systems were nominal, so I lay there for a few minutes going over in my mind the events of the last hour before the explosion. I went right back to when I closed up the tunnel from the MTV to the Lander. I recalled everything I saw, checked, did, and re-checked. I recalled all the readings as best I could, nothing was off. Using my helmets HUD display, I even replayed the video file of what I had been recording with my helmet cam at the time of the explosion. There was absolutely nothing from separation, descent, and landing that indicated any problem that would have caused an explosion. Well, that left two possibilities. Either there was a problem with the propellant system that didn’t surface until after engine shut down or it was sabotage … or perhaps a third possibility … no … I didn’t have time to think about that. There would be time later for speculation absent any evidence.

  I was well aware of the security precautions taken by both the Corporation and the Americans. I doubted the Chinese or anyone else could have planted a device in the Lander. However, it’s said that everyone has a price. Perhaps they got someone who already had a security clearance, and a need to do it. There was undoubtedly going to be a big investigation back on Terra. However, my money really was on a mechanical fault. In fact, my money was on the primary and secondary couplings to the auxiliary RAD reserve tank. A lot of us thought it was useless, but the astronautic engineers had insisted on it.

  “Oh shit, they probably think I’m dead.”

  I detected the COM presence of the Work Habitat COM system, but I could not access it or pair with it until I was physically standing at the control panel inside the Habitat. The guest connection I had used previously would not process communications, only data exchange. The Lander system had automatically connected upon touchdown, but I didn’t have the Lander interface anymore. Same with the Mar-Sat and Jalopy-Sat signals, I could detect their presence but could not do anything with them until my suit system was authenticated via the Habitat system. The Landers COM relay was obviously not functioning. This suit was going to be effectively mothballed once I reached the surface. I guess no one thought it was worth putting an automatic pairing procedure in with the descent preparation procedure either. That would definitely have to be changed for future manned missions.

  I started to shuffle my body downwards, to exit the airlock debris through the ceiling when one of my internal mantras came up in my mind, economy of effort. I started moving the other way, then worked slowly at detaching the large duffel/transport bags, the two foot lockers and the two weapons boxes. I then moved them a little awkwardly, but fairly easily towards my feet. Got to love the low-g. I kicked the bags out ahead of me and shuffle-slid the boxes towards the opening. Last thing I grabbed was my tablet and the handheld camera, hooking them both to my utility belt. I finally went through the impromptu exit and was able to look up.

  There was a large hunk of the Lander’s shell that looked like a dull can opener had pried it up. It had flipped over the airlock wreckage forming a canopy over my egress solution. I took a moment to check my HUD and other Activity Suit systems.

  I crawled on my hands and knees from under the wreckage canopy and lifted my upper torso, still on my knees. My back twinged a bit, but I felt a lot better now that I wasn’t in the tin can that had almost become my coffin. As my eyes adjusted to the relatively bright Martian light, I rested in the kneeling position with my hands on my hips looking around. I could see the blackened crater that indicated where the Lander had been sitting. The airloc
k, as I suspected, had remained mostly intact and had been ejected about 30 feet from the Lander by the force of the explosion. I could see on the other side of the small crater that there was another large chunk of ship still intact. Dollars to donuts, it was the Head. I later found out I was correct in that assessment. Odd, the two safest places in a Lander are the airlock and the shitter. Damn.

  For about 300 metres in every direction there were smoking hunks of metal and other ship components. There were no fires, although the scorching indicated there had been, at least briefly. I guessed they had burned out pretty quickly in the thin atmo. The debris was still hot enough that what would have burned was still smouldering, thus, smoke. I could see a lot of the supply bags and equipment boxes. It was also raining debris over the whole area, and probably would for several more minutes. The debris was small enough, falling slow enough, and far enough away that I could get out from under this canopy and stand up. I started crawling forward on my hands and knees but just as I was about to stand up, I took dizzy and nauseous all of a sudden. I stayed motionless on my hands and knees until the dizziness and nausea passed. It didn’t take too long. I didn’t think it was a concussion, but with head trauma that was a possibility.

  I slowly stood up and then turned in a slow circle looking at the smouldering wreckage. Not so oddly, the sight of the wreckage was conflicting with the sheer beauty of the setting I was in. To the west was the ice wall. I could see it clearly, the reds and dark greys of embedded sand on the face of it. North was the flat, slightly rolling and rocky terrain of Chasma Boreale proper. To the west and east were the sand dunes of Hyperboreae Undae that stretched for hundreds of kilometres. The sky was the yellowish gray I had been expecting. The atmosphere had no thick ozone layer to make it blue when the sun was high in the sky. Blue sky didn’t happen until evening time on Mars. Since I was in the latitude of the summer long midnight sun, I wouldn’t see an evening sky for another two or three months. The rocky ground, of course, was red and brown.