On Mars Pathfinder (The Mike Lane Stories Book 1)

by Jim Melanson

  Opposite the airlock, on the back of the Hab, there was a good sized storage room. I opened the hatch and looked inside. It was fully stocked, and everything was wrapped in plastic. Beside the storage room was the electrical room. It had the power management and power distribution equipment. This room would bring in electricity collected by the solar collectors and wind collectors, and then redistribute it through this Work Hab; and up to three more Habitat units, two of which would not be arriving for another fifteen months. Right now it was drawing power from solar cell reels that had been extended and hooked up by Big Dawg and Little Dawg, the day after this Habitat unit had been moved into its current position. The same had been done to the Living Hab so that it was powered up and ready for my arrival, even though it still had to be moved a short distance to its final position. The other Hab unit managed its own power when hooked up to the solar collectors, but its power would be supplied via the work Hab once the wind farm was online.

  The last room, occupying the left side of the lower level of the Work Hab was the mechanical and life support room. The AtmoGen, water and life support controllers, all fed into and were distributed from this room. This is also where the two 500 litre water tanks were located, full of Terran water. It made the Work Hab a lot heavier to get here, but it was necessary as the water mining would not start until after my first Martian winter. The recycling system, which allowed only a two litre per day expenditure, made this necessary delay viable.

  I walked back around the staircase. The steps were directly opposite the airlock door, yet very close to the airlock door in fact. It was a cramped space. The steps were fairly spacious though, about 70 centimetres wide. There was a column in the center for the steps to attach to. This column went right up to the ceiling of the second level. It was also the channel for the feeds from the mechanical room to the second level for lighting and life support. Electrical and water went through the ceiling/floor between the levels. I stepped back into the airlock and grabbed one of the duffel bags, the video camera, and my tablet; both of which had been hanging off of my Activity Suit utility belt. I turned the camera off, and then I headed upstairs.

  I emerged into the second level and took a good look around. It smelled funny. Funny as in odd, not funny as in “ha-ha”. Sort of like a new car smell, with a bit of staleness. There was a portal (window) at the “front” of the Work Hab, above the outer airlock door. There was another portal directly opposite, looking out into what would come to be known simply as the “back yard”, with a view of the distant ice cliff.

  Looking at the rear of the workspace, on the left were two small rooms. One was an equipment room for the satellite uplink gear and the computer servers, etc. The other was a small storage room. It contained office supplies, spare laptops, a small water tank (full) for the mini-sink, some emergency rations, plus various other odds and sods. There were enough emergency rations to last four people for two weeks. Starting at the rear portal and moving right was the COM station and a workbench with hookup for computers. The computers were all in cushioned boxes strapped to the floor at a multitude of anchor points. There was also a small moveable work table and several chairs waiting to be unpackaged and put into use.

  Continuing on to the right was the active breezeway hatch with small storage closets on each side. Next, was a small workbench and workstation with a worktable/island in front of it. There was a small storage closet on the wall again, and then the conference table with unwrapped chairs. Dominating almost a quarter of the floor was a small glassed-in examination room/treatment room that could also perform the duties of an emergency operating room. To the right of the small medical bay (known to the future residents as Mini-Bay), was the passive breezeway hatch, and then back to the storage room: completing the tour of the second floor circle.

  The conference table was about six feet long and would also double as a workspace, games table and the site of many late night discussions once the first colony ship arrived. It was permanently attached in place, but there were some comfy chairs lashed to the floor and wrapped in plastic, just waiting to be used.

  The Work Habitat and the Living Habitat were to be attached by breezeways. These were air-tight tunnels that I would use to move back and forth, pressurized but not heated, without having to go outside. While it had an escape hatch, the Living Habitat did not have an airlock proper. The tunnel would extend from the active breezeway point and connect hermetically to the passive breezeway hatch on the other Hab unit. Each Hab unit had one active breezeway and one passive breezeway. This would allow an unlimited number of Habs to be daisy-chained together. I couldn’t connect these first two Habs until I moved the Living Habitat into its final position. Yes, there was a lot to do before I’d get a chance for some sleep, but right now I had to send a message and get some food. I was starving. I was also really tired. Did I mention that my re-acquaintance with gravity, even at one-third of Terran gravity, was getting real old, real fast? The lethargy I was feeling in my limbs made me long for the much easier weightlessness of space travel.

  I went over to the small sink, took off the wrapping material and primed the pump from the small tank in the store room. There were some plastic tumblers secured to the shelf above. I freed and unwrapped them, and then drew a small glass of water and drank it slowly. It had a plastic taste as it had been in the tank a long time, travelling all the way from Terra. One of the last tastes of Terran water I would ever have.

  I went to my duffel that I had carried around with me, opened it up and took out a package wrapped in a couple sweaters. It was a box of meal replacement bars. I had hoarded them during transit just for this purpose. I sat at the COM station, hooked up my tablet and initiated the handshake to properly pair it with the Habitat COM system. The handshake failed though. It took me a few minutes of cussin’ and typin’ to get the system re-initialized and configured to recognize the tablet. The pairing was completed easily after the configuration issues were addressed. Almost immediately my laptop message system popped up with several messages from Mission Control. I started reading those postexplosion messages while I slowly chewed on a meal replacement bar and sipped precious Terran water.

  Finishing the bar, feeling sated for now, and putting the hunger headache at bay, I turned the laptop tablet towards me. I activated the record function on the secure video software. The built in camera and microphone came on.

  “Hey there Mission Control. Mike Lane reporting to you alive and well from Mars! Can someone please tell me WHAT THE FRAK HAPPENED? Holy fireworks Batman, I’m standing there minding my own business, about to go walkabout on an alien planet and WHAMM, I get smacked from behind by a two-ton truck. I mean really, guys, come-on, is that piece of feh wu still under warranty? Can you get a refund? Damn.” I lowered my head then looked up with a smile. “Okay, got that out of my system. The good Lord delivered me safely, and I never had any doubt about that. I just didn’t realize how exciting He was going to make it.”

  That was when the giggles struck, and struck hard. They quickly became rib shaking laughter. Looking at the camera again, blue indicator light waiting for me, I continued, “I mean really, I take eight and a half months to travel 115 million miles in a tin can, and when I safely land on an alien planet … BAM! My ship explodes.” I laughed a few moments more until I got control of myself. It was time to finish and get some work done. The sun was past the high point in the sky and I needed to get the Living Hab set up. “Well, I guess it’s like Q said to Picard, if you can’t take a little bloody nose maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s dangerous out here.” I raised the remnants of the tumbler of water in a toast. “I’ve got work to do. I’ll be in touch after I move the Living Habitat.”

  I clicked the finish recording icon and then sent the message back to Earth without any encryption. I just didn’t care at this point.

  Walkin’ the Casbah

  How the Living Habitat was going to be moved was partially my idea. When I first jo
ined the Corporation, one of the first things we did was tour the Habitat manufacturing facility in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was a small privately owned enterprise just north of the Automobilwerk Wörth on the west side of the Rhein River. Very picturesque area, very capable staff, very serious about every bolt, nut, joint and seam. They knew our lives would depend on every single thing they did.

  Six of us spent two weeks living in a mock-up Habitat to get a feel for what we would be living and working with. After that, three of us spent a day with the engineers talking about how the Living Habitat (or any Habitat) systems integrated, and how it was going to be put precisely in position. We knew it couldn’t land closer than 200 metres to another Hab, because wind shear might blow it into it, and the rather large RAD engines could damage another Habitat quite extensively. The engineers’ solution was four titanium discs, like train wheels, which would lower down after landing, slightly lifting the Habitat from its landing struts. Big Dawg, the rover, would then attach to the Habitat structure and very, very slowly drag it into place. The big wheels were to have some power to them, so that they could rotate the Habitat structure if necessary, but they would not be able to traverse any distance on their own, even though they did assist Big Dawg’s towing ability.

  This discussion quickly revealed certain misgivings about how precisely they could achieve alignment, and what would happen if Big Dawg had to move it over rough terrain, or a worse scenario, too steep of a rise in the terrain; which would render the whole operation impossible. The darn thing did weigh seven tonnes on Terra after all.

  As I had stood there listening to the engineers, I had a stroke of genius. Okay, I thought it was genius. I outlined a radical, although not too complex, solution for the engineers. I thought for a moment they were either going to cry or shake my hand completely off my arm. Those German engineers certainly do get excited about their work. My solution was simple, allow the Habitat to walk into position. The mechanics of the solution were simple in my head. It was a bit more complicated in actualizing the idea but still something that could easily be done on Terra, and easily done on Mars. Instead of the complex computer programming for positioning the Habitat, the Rover would simply drag the Habitat on its train wheels as far as it could, and then the colonist on site would hook up a remote control unit and use pneumatically controlled legs to “walk the Habitat unit”.

  With its present position, I needed to move the Living Habitat (L-Hab) five feet closer to the Work Habitat (W-Hab), move it 45 centimetres to relative “left” and then rotate the L-Hab about 15 degrees. This positioning was too precise for Big Dawg’s rough towing ability, and I was glad I didn’t have to do it by hand (which it could be done, but with a lot of effort … by many people, with lots of block and tackle).

  I went back to the airlock and suited up again in my flight Activity Suit. Everything checked. I tore open the plastic on the first storage cupboard below the small bench in the airlock. I detached the flight restraints and removed two items. One was a heavy canvas bag that contained the small set of tools necessary for the exterior work around the Habitat structures. The second was the controller that would control the movement of the L-Hab on its mechanical, stubby legs. I depressurized the airlock, pulled the outer airlock door inboard. I leaned down to the floor to cut the restraints and pick up a large packaged coil of umbilical cables, to connect the two habitats, and tossed it out the door. It was kind of a jaw-dropping moment to watch it fall to the ground, so much slower than when things fall on Earth. “Neat-O,” I said to myself, and then climbed down the ladder. The airlock had a fail-secure system on the outer hatch. If no one passed through the outer airlock door for ninety seconds, the servos would kick to life and shut the door automatically. This was so one person wouldn’t leave and accidentally strand the others inside. I paused a moment, looking out over the not-so-distant sand dunes, and let the hatch close itself to make sure it worked, and it did.

  I walked around the W-Hab and headed towards the L-Hab. I stopped midway to look out over the debris that not so long ago, I had almost been part of. It had only been ninety minutes since I climbed out of the airlock wreckage. The smouldering had stopped. I sighed heavily, I was dead tired but had miles to go before I could sleep.

  The L-Hab was only ten feet away. Big Dawg had finished moving it there weeks ago. Little Dawg, with Big Dawg’s help, had uncoiled the solar collectors. Big Dawg’s manipulator arm had been used by Mission Control to plug in the solar collector power feeds. I walked the length of the five collector strips and removed the ground pegs holding it in place. Little Dawg was close by, so I walked over and deposited the pegs, 60 in total, into its utility tray. I didn’t want to lose them, and the rover might as well make itself useful.

  The L-Hab was almost in alignment but it needed to be five feet or less at the nacelle skirting and within three degrees of axis alignment with the W-Hab. First order of business was to remove all of the sections of the nacelle skirt. The walking process needed to extend the walking legs from underneath the L-Hab to accommodate the mechanisms of motion. I also needed to be able to see what was happening underneath to properly control the “walk”.

  I set down the controller in a safe place and then opened the canvas tool bag. I took out the universal wrench and went to work. All exterior coverings, ports, joints, etc. used a bolt with an inset head. For simplicity’s sake, the exteriors of all the equipment sent to Mars used six sizes of bolt, using three different size heads. The universal wrench had three attachments. Selecting the correct head size; it was like a backwards ratchet set. I placed the universal wrench head attachment into the depression in the bolt head, and turned it counter-clockwise. There was a power feature for this wrench, but I had not had time to charge it up, so I did it the old fashioned way. I moved a small slider on the side of it to put the power head into Manual-Ratchet mode. There were eighteen bolts to remove in each of the nacelle skirt sections. There were twelve nacelle skirt sections to be removed.

  I did this carefully and step-by-step according to the procedure I had memorized. All the bolts went into the pockets on the legs of my outer jumpsuit. Everything had a procedure for the mission, and for living on Mars. I had memorized most of them on the trip here and I knew from jobs I had in the past that a good procedure keeps you safe and protects you. I was not only a leader, I was a good follower. Life had shown me that all good leaders are at first, good followers.

  I moved the large pieces of metal away from the L-Hab and placed them together, leaning one on the other, in the order I removed them. I wasn’t worried about them going anywhere as the wind was only gusting around 20 km per hour according to the readout I checked before coming outside.

  I returned the wrench to the tool bag then walked over to the controller, picked it up and walked back to the L-Hab. Now it was pucker time. I knew the L-Hab had enough power for this, the batteries were fully charged, and I was moving it such a short distance that I didn’t need to disconnect the solar collector. It would just drag a bit with the L-Hab as it moved the few feet into position. I would re-align it afterwards. The pucker moment was going to be whether or not the “legs” responded. They were pneumatically powered and that pneumatic system was about to check out nominal, but it was still -20° Celsius. I had some concern that the low temps would affect the legs, even though the German engineering team assured me these temperatures, summer temperatures for this latitude, would not be a problem. They had guaranteed the legs and pneumatic system to work to -114° Celsius.

  There was close to six feet of space under the Habitat structures. The three very large RAD engine nacelles occupied most of the space. Eventually we would remove the RAD assemblies, but that was not scheduled until there was a larger team on the ground. There was a small box that had once been white but was now covered in soot. It was under the L-Hab bottom and directly beneath the active breezeway, which for today’s orientation was at the “rear” of the Hab, insofar as today’s movement considered the passive bree
zeway to be the front.

  I went back for the wrench and then used it to remove the cover plate from this previously white box. I remembered there was a pocket on the leg of my Activity Suit specifically for the universal wrench. I slipped it into the pocket and then uncoiled the cable attached to the controller. The box I had uncovered had two things in it, a USB port and a hardpoint clip. I snapped the metal protective cover off the USB port then plugged the controller into it. There was a small chain on the controller cable which I attached to the hardpoint clip, to keep the USB cable from being unplugged while we moved.

  At present, the L-Hab was resting on its landing struts. After Big Dawg finished moving the L-Hab, the train wheels had retracted and left the L-Hab on its landing struts for stability. The train wheels would never be used after today, so long as we didn’t have to move the L-Hab any great distance.

  I powered up the controller and checked the walker system, everything was in order. I activated the first step in the walking sequence.

  The first step in this process was to extend the four leg assemblies laterally. Each leg assembly had two legs that were on independent vertically mounted swivels. These were attached to the articulation controller, which was mounted under a third horizontally integrated swivel assembly. This allowed the legs to be turned in any direction and walk forwards or backwards. This entire leg assembly was on a strong piston arm that would extend them laterally beyond the base of the L-Hab. The legs had to unfold into position and the top swivel point could not rotate fully upward until the assembly had cleared the edge of the L-Hab itself. While it sounds complex, the design is fairly straightforward, and it allowed the L-Hab to be moved 360°.