Martian Valkyrie

by G. David Nordley

  The only choice we had was to try to trek to the Norwegian base. They couldn’t see our problem, because, of course, we had taken pains to land ourselves just below their horizon. We couldn’t radio them. No matter—our digital suit radios were encrypted for privacy. I briefly considered trying to telegraph some kind of primitive code by cycling my transponder— but I didn’t know one.

  It was a long walk, even in four-tenths of a gravity. Our suits were heavy, and we had to be very sparing of the power assist. We were all tired, scruffy, and unwashed. A few were injured. Some of us exceeded the capacity of the waste management systems built into some of our suits. I shall not try to describe the way we smelled. We didn’t know if anyone else in the Universe knew we were still alive.

  The historical parallels are endless, and great fun, I know. I led the bigger, more expensive, and more technologically advanced expedition, but I ended up seeing just what Scott saw. I think I understood the mixed feelings Scott must have felt as he approached the South Pole a century and a decade ago, when I saw the white-bordered blue cross on a red field painted high on the side of one of the Frames tanks.

  That flag had signified both the failure to be número uno, and the success of gaining his goal to Scott as well. It was in such a mental state that I approached the inflated plastic dome of the Norwegian base as the frigid Martian night began to descend on us. Our power was giving out, cold was seeping in, pride was gone, and there was only the business of survival.

  The Norwegian base was half a kilometer from their ships, and it was a mess. Pieces of the partly disassembled supply landers lay strewn about. There were hoses going this way and that. Empty containers lay where they had been unpacked. They seemed to have put little time into being tidy. On the other hand, there may have been a pragmatic purposefulness about the seeming clutter—anything important was in plain view and could be reached directly from their dome’s air lock.

  The transparent dome was doublewalled, and within that was a small white tent which seemed to be under positive pressure. It was also moving gently back and forth—clearly, we were not expected.

  But we were running out of air, and there was nothing to do but bang very hard on the outer airlock door. A trillion dollars, twenty nations, thirty-two men, and eleven months in space had come down to this moment of low comedy as our group of five desperate beggars shuffled like arthritic penguins up to someone else’s door. I did not quite appreciate it then—I was freezing and tired.

  The Norwegians thought that something was wrong with their equipment and responded to the noise immediately in hurriedly donned pressure gear, helmets in hand. Dr. Karinsdatter came out of the tent first. She clearly wasn’t expecting to see us and the power assisted hard suits look somewhat alien at first glance. It must have taken her a minute to close her mouth and open the outer air lock door.

  I came through last, as was my privilege. Strangely, I did not start shaking uncontrollably until I was out of the frigid suit and into the warm air of the Norwegian base. But what keeps going through my mind is not the low comedy, but the sad, haunting melody I heard as I came in from their airlock to safety Grieg, of course. Solvejg’s song, which will always be Ingrid s song, to me. It matched my mood of remorse and humiliation.

  By midnight, we had rigged emergency sleep sacks for my men from mylar blankets glued edge to edge, and settled them just inside the west perimeter of the dome. We ate a meal of reconstituted pasta and meat sauce that tasted extraordinarily good, as any meal will under such circumstances. I took a stimulant, notified our surprised colleagues in orbit that I was still alive, and began to analyze the situation and to evolve a course of action—but the next thing I knew, I was turning over under a blanket and it was morning. Dr. Karinsdatter was hovering over me with a communicator.

  I found my embarrassment at begging shelter in the Norwegian s love nest was nothing compared to what happened on Earth while I was asleep. Dr. Worthing’s initial effort to have the UN take over command of Halvorsen’s mission was resolved when Secretary-General Ryskoff secured Dr. Worthing’s resignation and put Halvorsen in charge of both missions. Halvorsen found out which department heads could still fit into engineering hats and put them to work with their people to get us back safely. The others stood aside and watched.

  Per thought that he had enough tools to fix our lander, if we could get fuel to it. But they were using carbon monoxide and liquid oxygen, while we were using hydrazine and nitric acid.

  To find out that this had been a consideration of Halvorsen’s from the start was another suitable lesson in humility for me. He had designed the Amundsen and the Fram, as much as anything else, as a lifeboats for us, in anticipation of our failure. So much for one problem.

  But once back in Mars orbit, we would have face the fact that we had, essentially, two and a half UN crews and two UN ships, one stuck out in an unuseful orbit almost out of maneuvering fuel. While Dr. Karinsdatter was seeing to my crew, I spoke to Per.

  “My plan had been to take the lander back to the Zhang-Diaz and transship propellant from our supply depot. But that lander will not fly again. Can the Amundsen ferry fuel?”

  “Nei. To go out to Deimos, circularize, then go back towing a large mass so we cannot aerobrake, and then burn back to Earth? We do not have enough fuel for that. The Zhang-Diaz has its nuclear engine; why not use that?”

  “The design is for only two more restarts, maybe three in a crunch. It’s a thermal cycling limit—after six or seven cycles the inner frit starts to crack. It was a trade that let them make the engines lighter and more powerful— they only needed four burns. So a main orbit transfer maneuver would need two more restarts which would likely lead to an engine failure during the Earth arrival maneuver.”

  “Ja.” Per smiled at me, this man whose only passion seemed to be this kind of technical problem, and that passion a mild one. “But you still have the reactor on the Leonov, powerful enough, I think, to get you all back. And you have the fuel and crew modules on the Zhang-Diaz. So, how do we now put all these pieces together?”

  We spent the day with computers, drawing screens, and styli, and came up with a plan to send to Halvorsen. We left it with the Norwegian’s computer to send, then turned in.

  Halvorsen then called me in the middle of the Martian night on one of the spare comm units the Norwegians had given me. The man could do a clinic on revenge, I think. I got some minor satisfaction by getting Per up to hear it, too.

  “OK,” he began once I was coherent. “Your Zhang-Diaz uses its main engines to push itself and the Leonov to almost rendezvous with the supply cache, then separates the reactor module. Then you complete the docking with chemical rockets. You fuel both ships, then you depart using the Leonov’s nuclear engine. Over.”

  Per joined me, as blurry-eyed as I. The inside of the dome was warm with bodies, overloading the Norwegian’s small recycler—I smelled not only my own body but everyone else’s.

  We were all down to shorts.

  “Sí.” I told Halvorsen. “Its engine can get both spacecraft to Earth if it can use the fuel left in the Zhang-Diaz as well as its own.” This much Per and I had discussed.

  “But, Dr. Halvorsen, to make this work, the fuel remaining in the Zhang-Diaz has to be pumped into the Leonov and we can’t pump under zero gravity. We must use the reaction control thrusters, or the weak gravity of Deimos to settle the propellant first. Once under thrust, the pumps work. But now we don’t have enough reaction control fuel to sustain that much pumping time. Over.” Minutes passed as I regretted using up my extra margin in the vain effort to get to Mars first.

  Finally, Halvorsen’s answer arrived: Ja. Your technicians said that was the only way to pump fuel. But then they said it can’t be done under main engine thrust because of where the thrust vector would have to be with the ships tied together. You have to gimbal the Leonov’s engine hard right, to put the thrust line through the center of mass, but the pump will shut down if the gimbal is more than five degr
ees, no? A safety measure.”

  I remember those cold blue eyes staring at me from the screen.

  “Uflaks. So you have to think harder. I think you know now well enough to look beyond what things were designed to do to see what they can do. And I think you know now well enough to learn from others, without it hurting your manhood. We are all tied together now, nei? It would be most helpful for you to solve this problem yourself for your self-respect and that of your crew Their morale is tied to yours. So now you think and you think hard. Tomorrow, you tell me what you think. Halvorsen out.”

  “Uf. I think better morning,” Per said, “good nights.”

  Learn from others, Halvorsen said. Tied together. Think hard. I inflated my mattress, removed everything but my shorts, and crawled into my bag without remembering that I had done so.

  I thought. The Norwegians used tethers to give themselves gravity during the mission coast phase. Fuel transfer required acceleration—which was not necessarily thrust. Our ships were not built for rotating around each other on tethers. Where would one attach them? Impossible.

  I did what I have done since a child to clear my mind. I prayed. Lord deliver me. Some call it a retreat to a fantasy world, a land of childhood Faith in tooth fairies and Easter bunnies. If so, why is it still so strong in me, as other illusions have dropped away? That I do not know. But I do know the absence from here and now settles my mind.

  An image came to my mind almost unbidden. I remembered watching the ships being hoisted up to their stations on top of the heavy lift vehicle. There were hard points in the noses where one could attach cables. Tethers. Just a little rotation would do for the fuel transfer, and, I thought, the system might be strong enough to give my crew some artificial gravity on the way back. I rolled out of the sack and headed for the terminals on the other side of the dome.

  I found Ingrid still working, under red night-vision lighting, packing samples for the morning’s departure at a flimsy looking bench opposite their tent. She wore shorts and a thin, dusty T-shirt. Not really understanding what was happening to me, I explained my idea with a breathlessness that had little to do with the mental effort.

  “Not so difficult.” She smiled. “We have spare tethers and hosing which we no longer need here.”

  The smile did it. She was lean, smooth, intense, glowing with health. She put a hand lightly on my arm. “Are you all right? You have been under much strain, I think.”

  God help me, I just put my arms around her, my head on her shoulder, and moaned. If I had done that at NASA, I would have been reported. But she made no objection. After a minute, she gave a slight low laugh, returned my hug, and rocked me back and forth like a child. Urgency overcame me. My hands found their way down her back and beneath the elastic of her shorts.

  “Are you trying to seduce me?” She asked, in a voice that neither invited nor condemned, but seemed more in the tone of curiosity.

  My men were wrapped in emergency blankets sleeping on the other side of the dome. Per was asleep in the tent. She could have yelled and destroyed me, humiliating me even beyond anything that had happened so far, I was that far out of line—and I could not help myself, not even for a moment.

  But instead of acting offended, she stroked me gently, “I do not mind.” she murmured. “Per is sometimes too polite.” She knelt to the floor and I followed. Her kisses were light and motherly at first, then more and more passionate. And so we two responsible adults made love, then and there, as if we were teenagers in the back seat of a car.

  All through it, she smiled at me as if I were a child she was indulging with a minor treat. And when it was over, I turned my head so that she would not see my tears. But she pressed my head to herself and held me again, as a mother would a child.

  “This is nothing wrong,” she murmured as my sobs turned into deep breaths. “We both needed it, so do not hate yourself for it. But now we must work on getting people back to Earth, yes?”

  Six sleepless hours of calls to Mission Control later, our engineers had conceded that the remaining crews could have some gravity on the way back—with the Leonov and the Zbang-Diaz tethered nose to nose. Fortunately, the UN ships were launched as fuel tanks with their interiors fitted afterwards—they could be rearranged for spin gravity from inside and that would give their crews something to do. The thermal control people griped, the communications people griped, the propulsion people smiled.

  And the numbers worked out, just. We would have to put everyone on the Leonov before the final Earth orbit capture burn, and discard the Zhang-Diaz, but my ship would have served its purpose as lifeboat and fuel tank by that time.

  But the Amundsen and Fram were designed to go directly to Earth, on a faster trajectory. The easiest thing to do was to not try for a rendezvous, but rather for those of us on the surface to stay with the Norwegians. I relinquished my diminished command to Boris Yakov on Leonov and watched the ticklish tether and departure operations from the surface. This was my penance for my pride.

  Three of my men lifted on the Amundsen with Ingrid while I and another lifted with Per on the Fram. We passed Phobos on the way out—the inner Martian moon would have to wait.

  We tethered together without incident after trans-Earth insertion in an operation that turned out to be surprisingly simple. Per went outside and hooked the ships together while they were nosed up to each other. Each ship then translated to its own right while the line played out, and when the cable was mostly out, did a small burn at right angles to the tether to induce the rotation. Any swinging motions were damped with attitude control thrusters.

  Despite six men and one woman, there were no struggles between people on the return mission. Its commander and her understanding first mate saw to that. The Norwegians had a little battery-powered tether runner that gripped the line like a set of tram wheels and pulled you from one ship to another. Ingrid made the trip once a week. We all had frequent times alone with her—and it was not necessarily for sex. People are made to come in pairs, I think, and there are times when it is comforting to be with a woman even if you do nothing but look at the stars, not even talk.

  One night three weeks out from Mars, we found ourselves in the dome alone. Per and Mustaffa were asleep below. We sat side by side on one of the acceleration couches, touching comfortably—and uncomfortably. I was fighting a war with myself inside, and losing, again.

  “Could you care for me, really?” I asked, meaning could you be the wife of a man who would protect you, who would not let you sleep with others, who would lead you instead of follow? “I think, at times, that I would undo everything to have you, and accept what fate that would bring.”

  To take another man’s wife? To steal in the bed a share of the glory I could not win among the stars? No man with self-respect would do that, but events had stripped me to my essential needs. I could summon little sympathy for Per either; he seemed far too careless with his property.

  Ingrid touched my lips with her fingers. “It could not be the same with you as with Per. He gives me the space I need and, in my way, I am unbreakably loyal to him. I enjoy doing things for people I care for, but not for life. I cannot be owned by anyone, and I think you want to own me.”

  Wanting what I cannot have is a way of life for me. It does not stop me from trying. I looked up at the Amundsen, far overhead on the other end of the tether. “Does it have a telescope?” I asked.

  “Of course it does,” she answered, “do you think they watch us now?” She smiled and waved at the distant ship. “Should we put on a show?”

  I shook my head. “Ingrid, God forgive me, I want to love you, but to prove it you ask me to abandon my culture, my concepts of right and wrong that lie more deeply in my soul than any other. I am ashamed of myself.”

  “I am not ashamed of what I do not think is wrong.” She smiled and added, “But I would not embarrass you. We can always turn out the lights, Enrico, so no one can see through the reflection.”

  I stared at her. “You kne
w.”

  “I know many things—like how to win a race to Mars, and how to run a happy ship.”

  “The maneuvers, the surprise separation. That wasn’t Halvorsen’s doing?”

  “Was Halvorsen on this ship? Was it Halvorsen who had a personal stake in being first—oh, he had point to make, but, nei, it was not a point that required his being first. If anything he is somewhat upset with me.” Her laugh was a throaty burble of delight. “No, that dear old man did not beat you to Mars. I did. I wanted to be first because I am a woman and I wanted to do something no one would ever forget, or put in second place. So I did it.”

  The look of complete shock on my face must have troubled even her. Good men had died—but did they die because of what she did, or because of what I did in response? And if she had not responded and it had happened anyway—I and five more would be dead.

  “You must get used to this, I think.” She caressed my chest and murmured, “It is not so hard to understand, is it? That no one owns me, that I, too, pursue my own goals and my own happiness?”

  But it was hard. My mind was elsewhere, so lost in the maze of contingency that the only way out was to step out of the maze entirely through a greater dimension—that of providcnce. What happened, happened. It was not my fate to be first in anything—on Mars, or in the heart of the woman I must love, and hate, more than any other. Finally I took solace in how far from being last in all these things I was.

  “I should die for this,” I said before my lips met hers for what I vowed would be the last time. “Or you. I am not sure who.”

  I did not gain the reward of death during the aerocapture maneuver when the Amundsen reached Earth, and I had to endure the purgatory of weeks and months of impoliteness from the insatiable vampires of the media. I fled to southernmost Argentina. Per and Ingrid went to Mars twice more, and settled there in 2043.