Martian Valkyrie

by G. David Nordley

  Martian Valkyrie

  G. David Nordley

  Sometimes having to do things on a tight budget just might have an advantage or two.

  G. David Nordley

  Martian Valkyrie

  I, Enrico Lopez, am the first man to set foot on Mars and come back alive. But there are moments when I feel a heroic death, like that of Robert Falcon Scott, would have suited me far better. Better than what I must live with, and what I must live without.

  Back in Bergen, old man Halvorsen must still be laughing. Yes, he is still alive and intends to live forever. Any day now, the genetic engineers have been saying. Good for him. He does not dare die, I think, for where he is going they will not be so gentle.

  Let him laugh, part of me says. Despite our problems, we got much more scientific data, core samples, measurements, and everything. Our rovers roved, our balloons floated, and our scientists have enough data for a million graduate theses. So, in the long view of things, I suppose it matters not one bit who was first on Mars or how we got back.

  Except to me, and to history.

  Four days out from Earth on our very carefully planned trajectory, things had settled into a nominal routine. The United Nations’s official expedition was a four-ship orbital armada, with forty carefully chosen and politically representative scientists and astronauts and the latest hardware, including nuclear thermal rockets and power-assisted hard suits. With a trillion dollars spent in planning, programming, research and development before the first cargo ships left low Earth orbit, we had all the requirements covered. As its commander, I would be on the first shuttle down and first on the surface. I had my speech memorized.

  I remember the moment everything changed with vivid clarity. I was in my double-sized cabin on our flagship, the Zhang-Diaz, and had just strapped myself into my bunk and ordered the lights down. I had just started to dream about my wife, Linda, and other women I have known, when two loud tones signaled an event important enough to perturb my sleep schedule. I mention it because, even at the expense of my dignity, I cannot resist this irony. For those who believe in signs, there it is.

  A voice followed the chimes. “Enrico, this is Mustaffa.” Ahmed Mustaffa was the spacecraft’s master and my second for the expedition.

  “I am awake. What is it?”

  “We just downloaded a message from Thor Halvorsen. That Norwegian lunar expedition—it’s departed and it doesn’t look like it’s going to the Moon.”

  “Where else would it go?” I asked. The Norwegians’ tiny, stubbornly independent space exploration effort had just assembled two lunar spacecraft in low orbit. Had they had another accident? Two years ago, they had lost the supplies for a Norwegian lunar base camp when their cargo ships had failed to do the lunar orbit insertion burn. Cut-rate space programs are the most expensive kind, I told myself. Would we have to rescue them and sacrifice some or all of our own mission? “What is the message, Mustaffa?”

  “All the message said was, ‘Norway mission headed toward Mars— Halvorsen.’ But there’s a press release appended. The file’s under ‘Halvorsen ’ ”

  I suddenly felt cold. It was no accident. Had it been anyone else, I would have taken this as a historical joke, but, a generation ago, Halvorsen had found the buried glacier in the rim of Amundsen Crater near the lunar south pole—with a tenth the usual budget. He took his nation s history of exploration very seriously, and he had all the daring and competence of his forbears.

  My cabin featured a small desk next to my bunk, and over the desk was my vid, a mosaic of sixteen flat high-resolution panels joined seamlessly in a commander-sized interface display. A perk of office, but I had to get out of bed to look at it. I resealed and adjusted my tight suit, undid the velcro restraints, and swung myself out of the bunk so I floated in front of it. The sterile circulating air chilled me—our vents did their job so efficiently that they took even the smell of my body away before it could reach my nose.

  “Display the Halvorsen file,” I said. Text and a diagram filled the vid.

  I stared at the report in disbelief. They had launched themselves on an eighty-eight day trajectory with a chemical rocket, obviously intending to use the Martian atmosphere in an aerocapture maneuver.

  Many studies going back to the 1980s showed that was a terrible idea. It was too hard, they said, to design a big interplanetary spaceship that would fit behind an aeroshield. They said the density of the Martian atmosphere was too variable to plan a precise thirteen-kilometer-per-second aerobraking maneuver. Without it, they said the mission called for some thirty kilometers per second of total delta-V, and this required development of the nuclear-thermal rockets.

  Halvorsen had laughed at them then, and now, apparently, had launched his own expedition.

  “Mustaffa, one of three things will happen:

  “First, and most likely, the Norwegians will kill themselves. They will either burn up or fail to be captured.” Perhaps, for a fleeting moment, before good Christian conscience took charge of my thoughts, I even hoped that they would.

  “Two,” I continued, “if mainly by luck, they manage to reach Martian orbit, we will probably have to rescue them. There is no way a ship that small could carry enough fuel for a landing and return, even using aero-braking. They are counting on our supplies and our good hearts to steal a share of our glory.” We would, of course, perform the rescue. Ungraciously.

  “But, if all that is somehow wrong, the third possibility is that Halvorsen will make us look like idiots.” Perhaps I feared that the most. He had been on the original planning committee, but as the expedition had gotten bigger, more complex, more expensive, more politically influenced by the member nations, and more compromised, he’d become more and more obstinate. As one of those experts, I’d had words with him. Finally, he had stormed out of a meeting and not returned.

  Now he was saying, in effect, that he’d been right all along and that we’d spent a trillion dollars that could have been spent better elsewhere. I shuddered. If true, the media would dance on the graves of our reputations for years to come. That was the worst case I could imagine.

  Imagination, however, was never one of my strong points.

  “It will be as Allah wills,” Mustaffa said. “But I, for one, will try to avoid doing idiotic things.”

  “Sí. Zhang-D, put a telescope on the Moon.” We were already three million kilometers from Luna, but in a second, Mare Orientale filled the screen— three half rings bisected by the shadow line. It would be full Moon back home.

  “Center it left of the Farside limb, and give me maximum magnification.” Once the sunlit side of the Moon was off-screen, the video intensity readjusted, and I could almost see the shadowed lunar limb in silhouette against the star clouds of Sagittarius. Tiny specks of light flecked the farside of Luna now, explorers and settlements now almost a decade old. There was nothing moving, and for a moment I had hope that Halvorsen’s announcement was a joke—Halvorsen paraphrasing what Amundsen sent to Scott a century and a quarter ago.

  Then I saw them emerge from our Moon’s shadow Two spots of light, brighter than any nearby stars. They seemed to be moving slowly relative to each other as well as against the background.

  A line flashed between the spots of light. What? Of course. It was the specular glint as a cable caught the Sun just right. Halvorsen, of course, would have used tethers for artificial gravity, after all our committees and systems analysts had decided they were more problems than they were worth.

  “Put a dish on them and listen. Contact Mission Control. I’ll be up to ops in a minute.”

  I slipped into my coveralls. We should have been informed. I would talk to Dr. Worthing, man-to-man, from the dignity of my command deck at the front of our ship.
<
br />   But only three or four seconds had passed before, “Mission control wants to talk to you.”

  Of course. I shook my head hard to stimulate myself, pushed the door at the end of my cabin open and emerged from my cell at the aft end of the octagonal common room like a new bee into a hive. My hatch thunked shut and “Blue shift” crew members glanced at me from each of the four “floors” spaced at equal intervals around the hull. I tried to appear unhurried, and nodded to each of them.

  There was a pole down the center of this to guide passers-by, but, in a display of the zero-gravity competence expected of a commander, I jumped for the ops hatch directly from my cabin door.

  Command ops occupied the forward end of the cylinder, some nine meters away, and I prided myself on my ability to jump the distance without using the pole, shoot through the opening without touching its sides, and catch myself with my toes.

  My little maneuver went unwatched above. Mustaffa was alone, twirling his moustache, his dark eyes intent on the command video display as Dr. Worthing of the U.N. International Space Authority gave their version of events. They, he said, “welcomed all space exploration efforts” but “were concerned about the possible complications of another mission, and in particular, one formulated with so many differences in basic philosophy.” This went on for a few minutes, then the ISA signed off.

  “Nobody on the back line for me?” Mustaffa turned toward me and shrugged. “What bureaucrat has the patience for a time lag between speeches? We have a half-megabyte download of instructions on how to handle press questions from the ISA. It’s GMT midnight at Earthport—the public relations people are asleep.”

  “The press! Public relations! Caramba! What do we do about Halvorsen’s mission?”

  Mustaffa shrugged. “It appears we arc to continue for now as if nothing has happened”

  “But what if they… Get a ground line. I’ll talk to Halvorsen myself!”

  “Enrico, it is after midnight in Norway and he must be eighty—”

  “Wake the old fart up!” I pursed my lips. Halvorsen, for all his obstreperousness, was a legend of space exploration. It wouldn’t do to display my anger to the crew. “I’ll take it in my cabin.”

  I’d worked for the U.S. NASA for twenty-three years, but I was dark-complexioned, had straight black hair, and had retained my Argentine citizenship. This had made me politically acceptable as the U.N. expedition commander—and a target for some of Halvorsen’s criticism. So, if he succeeded in beating us to Mars, he would get back at me and prove me not only wrong, but unnecessary.

  It took twenty minutes, but Mars Mission Control made the connection and I saw the old, straight-backed, craggy-faced, iron-haired descendent of Viking barbarians, dressed in a night robe, frowning at me in what seemed to be a living room. At least the backdrop was a great stone hearth strewn with models of rockets and Moon rocks.

  I started by asserting my authority as leader of Earth’s official expedition and taking an attitude of outrage. “What do you think you are doing? Over.”

  Forty seconds of light-speed delay gives one time to question one’s wording with no opportunity for recall. I was talking to a man many years my senior and an acknowledged legend. This was not a pleasant way to converse.

  “Well,” he said, pronouncing his “W” as if it were a “V.” “I am sitting in my home listening to Grieg. Per and Ingrid are going to Mars. Over.”

  The same crew that had gone to the Moon with him. Per Nordli was a cool, tall, diffident, brown-haired man. He had no cojones, but was otherwise respectable. But his wife looked and acted like someone more comfortable in a bikini than a spacesuit. Make that half a bikini.

  “You sent that bimbo Karinsdatter!” I shut my eyes to regain my composure. I needed to interface with his technical staff on flight plans, to prepare contingencies, before we got too far away for comfortable discussion.

  “Where are your people, your mission control center? I was told you are heading a mission control operation. Over.”

  While I waited for his response, I shuddered to think of the problem Karinsdatter represented. Our Mars expedition was full of men from developing Islamic, Oriental, and Hispanic cultures—and the sponsoring nations thought the first mission would be hard enough without sexual complications. We had carefully negotiated a decision not to include women on the first mission. Now Halvorsen, on his own, had decided otherwise. Bad enough—but for him to send Dr. Ingrid Bodil Karinsdatter, however theoretically qualified, to Mars was an unforgivable insult.

  Yes, for some it would be insulting just because she was a woman. But the problem was more because of the kind of woman she was. After she had become famous, she spoke up for population control efforts in opposition to many of the religious leaders of Earth. She used a non-traditional feminist surname. She had posed for a magazine. I and many other NASA astronauts—especially the women—had publicly blasted her for that. In return, she had made comments about American prudery.

  Was Ingrid Karinsdatter someone to dangle before forty men fifty million miles from Earth? Ten of my crew were from conservative Islamic countries. Now, in the Norwegians, I faced a culture whose ideals of womanhood were ski champions, marathon runners, Valkyrie warriors, prime ministers, or Viking queens with names like Aud the Deep Thinker. To that, add the crazy license with which all these modern European women display themselves now that the fear of AIDS has gone.

  I stared, tight-lipped, at the large, but simple and spare living room behind Halvorsen, waiting for transmissions to go there and back. Finally he shrugged, almost as a Frenchman would.

  “I recruited Per and Ingrid who were with me on the Amundsen Crater expedition. Their children are old enough to leave alone now and I am too old and too blind to do anything but think and talk. But I still do that not too bad, nei? Ja, I know how you talk of Ingrid. But that is your problem. As for mission control, this is it such as it is. I use my house computer and my videophone.”

  So their standing army was this old half-blind man standing in front of me. Who did he think he was? Goddard? Korolev? Von Braun?

  “Oslo University,” he continued, “is giving me time on their radio telescope and some volunteer help. That is all. We only have a two person expedition, assembled from standard modules. Over.”

  I frowned. The Norwegians had bought their way into space with oil money and a cut-rate single-stage shuttle design that NASA had smothered to death. It had a payload of five tonnes to a five-hundred kilometer orbit at best. And they’d hardly changed a thing since their Moon escapade. There was no way they could reasonably hope to get a round trip out of that, I thought. They were planning on using us—they had to be—and that made me angry.

  “This isn’t fair, Halvorsen. Our lives may be put at risk. Now will you tell Per Nordli to follow our lead; to do just what we say? So we can get him and his wife back safely? Over”

  I waited. Halvorsen’s expression changed to ice when he got my transmission. “Nei! We plan that they get back by themselves! As for putting lives at risk, you do things so stupid and complex it is you that may all die. That is why I walked out of your meetings. Uf dah! Bureaucrats, empire builders, and egomaniacs. Bah!” Across six million kilometers and through two sets of communications electronics, this craggy gray old Viking speared me with the contempt in his nearly sightless eyes. “It is too late to be talking such nonsense. Halvorsen out!”

  The image dissolved to a UN link operator who told me that Halvorsen had hung up, not waiting for my sign-off. In retrospect, I may have been too peremptory myself, but still, the insult stung.

  I called a staff meeting to decide how to deal with the Norwegian expedition. It would take us four days to rendezvous with our Deimos supply depot, refuel, deploy our landers, and be ready to mount any kind of an operation, we reasoned. The Norwegians would most likely have trouble during aerobraking, so it would be best if we were in place before they got there.

  Nobody wanted to call it a race, but we examined our
trajectory margins to see if we could get to Mars earlier. But the trajectory people told us the time to have done that was in low Earth orbit. Now, it would eat into our reaction mass budget more than mission rules would allow. The Norwegians, it seemed, would get to Mars orbit before us. Dead or alive, but first.

  Not if I had my way. We had plenty of fuel margin—there ought to be some way of stealing a little of that to shave some days off our trajectory. There was a planned midcourse burn only forty hours away. If it was just a little bigger… I knew my way around mission planning bureaucracies—I called the man in charge of trajectory analysis and asked him if he could run some contingency cases that had looked good to us. Strictly hypothetical? I grinned at the planner and he grinned back. He wanted to win, too.

  It looked good.

  Two days later, I was smiling and it was Halvorsen who was angry.

  “We plan so our ships will be out of your way. Now we all get there at once bam-bam and will all be so busy that no one will have time to help anyone! And you use up your fuel margin! Over!”

  “You are mistaken in your exaggerations, Dr. Halvorsen,” I answered, calmly. Dr. Obote, our ground orbit analyst, also exaggerated when he’d called to upbraid me for my non-nomi-nal burn. But after a few Swahili expletives, he acquiesced to the fait accompli and participated in the “discretionary-modification-well-within-mission-parameters” official cover.

  “My fuel margin,” I continued to Halvorsen, “is not used up and we will arrive in Mars orbit well ahead of you.

  For which you should be profoundly thankful if we have to rescue your people. Now that possibility is an unplanned complexity and need for coordination. Over”

  I relaxed and contemplated our trajectory display with a smile. The arrival time difference was up to five hours, now—in our favor.

  Finally, Halvorsen frowned and opened his mouth. “We have sufficient redundancies and do not require or plan on your help. You have enough problems just executing all you have planned. I ask you now to forget we are there and concentrate on your task. Over.”