Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  Radkowski closed his eyes, trying to picture the situation. He wasn’t good at doing math in his head. Five thousand kilometers, that was, what, three thousand miles. Slightly less than one Earth radius. “It’s still not enough,” he said.

  “Right,” Ryan said. “Not enough. Yet. Okay, here’s what happens next. The return vehicle is screaming in from five thousand kilometers, see. It has a lot of excess kinetic energy to dissipate. So what happens? Here’s what happens. Highly elliptical orbit. I dip into the atmosphere. But, here’s the trick. I don’t just use the atmosphere to brake. The return vehicle has lift, right? It’s a lifting body. So I point it sideways. Roll the beggar over ninety degrees, use the lift as a vector. I can take my excess delta-vee, and I can turn it into plane-change vector. Two passes through the atmosphere, I’ve got the orbit circularized, and as a free bonus, I get my plane change. Piece of cake.”

  “Shit,” Radkowski said. “Does that really work?”

  Ryan had been spinning lazily end over end as he talked. As he finished talking, his head was in the middle of the lounge, his feet next to the computer console. He reached out with one foot and tapped the keyboard. The screen lit up. Ryan smiled. “Believe it,” he said. “I’ve got it all worked out in computer simulation.”

  Radkowski nodded. What Ryan was looking for, he realized, was not for somebody to check his work—it was obvious that he had complete confidence in that. So what was he asking about? “You’re requesting for permission to use the CRV?”

  Ryan Martin shook his head. “Radkowski, I’m not asking your permission. I’m going, whether you agree or not.”

  “You take that CRV without permission,” Radkowski said, “and they’ll kick your ass so far out of the astronaut corps that you won’t need a booster to get into orbit.”

  “Maybe they will.” He shrugged. “Nevertheless, permission or no permission, I’m not going to leave them to die.”

  “Okay,” Radkowski said. “We’ll do it.”

  Ryan reached out a hand to stop his slow spin and looked up at Radkowski in surprise.

  “Just one minor detail,” Radkowski said.

  Ryan smiled. “Name it.”

  “This mission you’re proposing is dangerous as hell, more than likely it’s not going to work, and even if it does work, it may already be too late to rescue the Russians. Half-baked, untested, dashed-together schemes like this are a formula for killing pilots. There’s no chance I’m going to let you do it.”

  “It’s not dangerous,” Ryan said. “I know I’m low on pilot-in-command hours, but the computer will be doing the flying. If it looks like I can’t make the rendezvous, the computer will tell me, and I will abort to Earth.”

  “No, you won’t. You’d only end up killing yourself, and I’m not about to allow you do that,” Radkowski said. “I’m going to fly it myself.”

  7

  DESCENDING

  Rappelling down is the part of a climb that most rock climbers like least. To Trevor, however, rappelling was the best part. It gave all of the giddy thrill of hanging on a rope over immense heights, with far less work than actually climbing. He had rappelled long before he had ever climbed, driving with his older brother to the top of canyons in Arizona and rappelling down the cliffs. So he knew about rappelling.

  Nevertheless, he watched Ryan as he fed rope out. The superfiber was different. The fiber itself was coated with a monolayer of fluoropolymer that gave it an incredibly low friction; this meant that the fiber was less likely to snag on protrusions or be sawed through by a sharp corner, but also meant that only the specially designed braking mechanisms worked well on it.

  The commander was smooth and matter-of-fact about belaying down. Trevor had always descended a cliff in bounces, pushing off and dropping, letting the cable swing him back into the cliff like a pendulum. It was more fun that way. The commander, though, methodically paid out line through the braking fixture, and walked step by step backward, his eyes fixed on the rock at his feet.

  Boring.

  When the commander got to the rover, he called up “off belay,” and Ryan relaxed.

  The next step would be harder. With one arm useless, and an ankle that would not take any strain, there was no way that Estrela would be able to rappel down the cliff.

  Ryan strapped Estrela tightly into a harness and attached a belay line for safety.

  “Santa Luzia,” Estrela said. “Be careful, will you?”

  Ryan set the fiber into the winch. “I’ll do the best I can,” he said.

  8

  THE RESCUE

  The tether launch from the space station had been flawless, a high-stakes game of crack-the-whip, with John Radkowski, alone in the crew return vehicle, at the very tip of the whip, flying off on a precisely controlled trajectory at the exact apex of the sling. He had kept his hands off the controls during the descent through the atmosphere. No human could maintain the knife-edge tolerances needed for a hypersonic lifting aeropass, and so the guidance computer, with its crystalline logic and perfect mathematical calculations, had done the flying, comparing the predictions of the computer model with the performance of the actual vehicle a thousand times a second, adjusting in real time for variations in exospheric density and discrepancies between the computer model and the actual vehicle.

  Now, floating in the crew return vehicle, there was nothing left to do but wait for the slow pirouette of orbits to bring the Mirusha station into range. It seemed as if the vehicle was motionless, and the Earth, endlessly varying, flowing like a sluggish river beneath it. John Radkowski was waiting, alone in space. It was in situations like this, when he had nothing to do but wait, that Radkowski was alone with his inner resources, and found them wanting. He felt lost in an immensity of void stretching off in all directions, and with the realization pounding in from all around him that he was nothing, an insignificant speck in the universe.

  The thought both comforted and terrified him.

  Focus on the control panel. Check the fuel levels again, for the hundredth time. Check the battery voltages. Check the radios. Focus on the radar. Is that the Russian station? No, it’s still too early.

  His breath came in short, shallow pants, and he struggled to control his breathing, to avoid hyperventilating.

  Focus on the control panel. Breathe evenly. Is that signal acquisition?

  Yes. The indicator light glowed with the acquisition of carrier, and then the radio spoke. “CRV-1, here is Nordwijk. We’ve got you on the screens.”

  The voice spoke in a crisp, Scandinavian-accented English. “You’re looking good.”

  “Nordwijk, CRV-1,” he said. “Thanks for the update. How long before I expect to acquire signal from Mirusha?” The mission control at Houston had been cool toward the idea of trying to fly a rescue mission—probably they still remembered the humiliation of the Russians pulling out of the space station project—but they had not actually forbidden it. The European space center in Nordwijk, on the other hand, had been enthusiastic, and guaranteed him as much help as they could give. This was little enough—radar readings from the ground tracking stations to confirm what the interior navigation of the crew return vehicle already told him—but he was glad enough for it.

  “CRV-1, you should be getting transponder now,” Nordwijk told him.

  He frowned. He was getting nothing. No, there it was on his rendezvous radar. But where was the transponder?

  He was coming up on it backward; by the strange ballet rules of orbital mechanics, Mirusha was coming up from behind him as he rose to meet it. He could see it now, a brilliant, lumpy star blazing in the sunlight. “Roger, I’ve acquired it visually,” he said. He checked the rendezvous radar. Eight kilometers, closing rate one-fifty meters per second. He corrected his vehicle pitch slightly and made a three-second engine burn with the maneuvering engine, raising his perigee to bring his orbit closer to synch with the Russians, and checked the radar again. Five kilometers, closing rate fifty-two. In his window, the Mirusha was
a fat insect with blue metallic wings. He should be able to raise them on the radio. They knew he was coming.

  “Mirusha, this is the American ship CRV-1. Do you read? Mirusha, CRV-1.”

  No reply.

  The station was dark. He brought the crew return vehicle in cautiously. With the crew on the Mirusha not responding to his increasingly insistent signaling, it would be impossible for him to dock to the station as planned. This was a problem. He was wearing a pressure suit, but it was a precaution against a vehicle depressurization only, not a suit rated for an extravehicular activity. There was no help for it, though. He had come this far, it would be pointless for him to stop.

  “Mirusha, CRV-1. Do you read? Mirusha, do you read?”

  He brought the CRV in as close to the Mirusha as he dared. He had only one safety line, a twenty-foot line, and he clipped one end of it to the CRV and the other to the hook on his suit. Then he did a final suit check, opened the hatch, and jumped.

  The docking hatch was barely six feet. He hit the station’s skin, scrambled for a handhold and missed, rebounded away, and as he started spinning away, by flailing wildly he managed to hook the EVA handrail with one hand. He clutched at it and held on, and then, more calmly, pulled himself toward the hatch.

  It opened freely.

  There was no way for him to stay attached to the CRV when he went into the airlock. He had to unhook. The manual would have instructed him to attach a second safety line to the Mirusha before unhooking from the CRV, but there was no second line available. He unclipped the safety line and clipped it on to the EVA handrail, trusting blindly that it would be strong enough to prevent the CRV from drifting away and leaving him stranded.

  He entered the airlock and closed the inner door. A light should have illuminated when the inner door closed, but the chamber was pitch black. He flicked on his suit light and by its feeble illumination, found the hand-wheel that opened the inner door.

  The wheel spun freely. There was no pressure on the other side.

  In the long, slow fight against a steady leak to space, the two Russians on the space station had lost their fight. There would be no heroic rescue. The dark space station and the lack of internal pressure told him that there was no one left to rescue.

  Time had run out.

  In all his future years, John Radkowski would remember that lesson. You can be clever, you can come up with daring ideas, and sometimes they even work.

  But sometimes, all of your work and all of your courage is not enough. Space is cold and empty and unforgiving, it does not care about human tragedy or last-minute heroics or brilliant piloting skills.

  Sometimes your time runs out.

  9

  ON THE SLOPE

  The lesson that John Radkowski had learned from the failed Mirusha rescue was that Ryan Martin was bright, impulsive, and that he needed to be carefully watched.

  And the second lesson he learned was that sometimes, despite the best you can do, missions fail. And then people died.

  He had no time to waste in thinking about ancient failures, Radkowski told himself. The footing at the base of the cliff was treacherous. He was standing on a slope of loose rock that had broken free of the cliffs above and sloped down at a forty-five-degree angle to the true bottom of the canyon. He tested the surface cautiously. The angular rock fragments ranged in size from small pieces the size of dinner plates to enormous ones the size of refrigerators and even small automobiles. They seemed to be loosely cemented in place by a coating of some form of desert varnish. It seemed relatively stable. Good. He worked a piece that was roughly the size and shape of a guitar loose with his foot, kicked it down the slope, and watched it bounce and ricochet another five hundred feet down the hill. It knocked a few smaller rocks free, but didn’t start an avalanche. Good.

  The rock fragments were light yellow, much lighter in color than the dark rocks they had been traversing. The cliff walls were light-colored as well, he noticed, all except for a dark stripe maybe a hundred feet wide at the very top.

  He drilled a bolt-anchor into the cliff and tied the rockhopper down to free the winch line. There wasn’t much he could do but wait for Ryan Martin to start lowering Estrela. He didn’t like not being in control, but there was nothing he could do at this point.

  He checked the rockhopper again, to make sure it wasn’t about to slide down the slope, and decided it was secure enough that he didn’t need to put in another bolt. Right up against the cliff face the loose rock was almost a ledge. John Radkowski sat.

  No sense in doing nothing. He was still high enough up to get a good overview of the base of the canyon. He unpacked the binoculars and scanned the terrain.

  From here, the base of the catena looked rougher than they had expected from the orbital view. It was a jumble of tilted slabs of rock.

  Painstakingly, John Radkowski began to scout out a path.

  10

  ON THE SLOPE

  I’m sweating,” Estrela said.

  “For heaven’s sake, turn on your cooling loop, then,” Radkowski told her.

  “It’s already up all the way.”

  After lowering Estrela, Ryan and Tana disassembled the winch and were lowering it down to Commander Radkowski. This was a slightly tricky operation—they had to lower it by hand—and Radkowski had little time to hold Estrela’s hand if she had forgotten how to program her interior climate settings. He ignored her.

  Estrela went into the rockhopper, still complaining that she was too warm. She was awkward in climbing in, with only one arm, but she finally got inside and pulled the hatch closed behind her. Radkowski barely noticed.

  Trevor, then Tana, and finally Ryan came one by one down the cliff. Ryan had to give Trevor some instruction in rappelling—the kid had a tendency to bounce down, instead of lowering himself down at a smooth walk to minimize the stress on the anchors. But eventually the entire crew was standing on the slope at the base of the cliff.

  They abandoned the superfiber cables used to descend the cliff; they had plenty of cable, and it was easier to leave the used cable behind than to retrieve it. Dangling down the cliff face, it was almost invisible against the light rock; in the places where it was in shadow it could not be seen at all. Over a few weeks, the harsh ultraviolet from the unshielded Martian sun would slowly chew away the covering, and once the fluoropolymer sheath was gone, the cable would disintegrate quickly. And all that would be left behind would be a few titanium bolts, anchored in rocks at the top of the cliff, to show that they had passed this way.

  They had made it down. It had been a lot harder than he’d expected it would be, but they were all down, and they were all safe.

  Maybe they would be able to take the big one after all.

  11

  ON THE BOTTOM

  The talus slope at the bottom of the canyon was steep, but except for a few minor rockslides when the wheels dislodged loose boulders, the rubble held, and John Radkowski managed to drive the rockhopper down the incline the rest of the way to the bottom of the catena without catastrophe.

  As he had expected from his surveying the territory from above, the terrain at the base of the canyon was rugged, cluttered with angular, refrigerator-sized boulders.

  At the base of the slope he called a halt for the day, and they found a nearly flat spot and pumped up the habitat bubble. The catena stretched out to either side of them, gently curving cliff faces towering over them, stretching as far as they could see. In the evening sunlight the cliffs turned from yellow to an intense orange.

  The habitat had an odd smell, the smell of Mars dust: a sharp, metallic scent, like the smell of a distant thunderstorm, or freshly machined aluminum. It was due to peroxides in the soil. Although they made efforts to keep the suits clean, a little dust had been brought into the habitat with each crew member’s return. It wasn’t a bad smell; in fact, it was almost refreshing—an improvement over the locker-room odor that the Don Quijote picked up, with six people living in it for half a year.


  There were the usual evening tasks to accomplish. Each suit had to be checked and refurbished for the next day’s action, the filters cleared, the recycling catalysts renewed, the zirconia cells baked out to clear away the sulfur poisoning. The suits had not been designed for as many hours of continuous hard usage as they were getting; twenty hours was an absolute design limit for the suit’s oxygen generation capacity, and Radkowski wanted to make sure that they stayed well below that limit. Just keeping the suits in shape took an hour each night.

  It was hard to sleep. Radkowski preferred free-fall, where a sleeping bag could be tethered to a wall in any quiet nook of the station and the sleeping accommodations would be softer than any feather bed on Earth. He couldn’t stop turning over the events of the day and worrying about how they could rescue the entire crew on a ship that was built for only two crew members. And, if the entire crew could not be returned, how he would choose? Eventually he fell into a restless sleep, but long before he was rested, it was day.

  In the morning they set out across the bottom of the catena. The terrain was too rough for the dirt-rover to easily traverse, so Commander Radkowski left the bike strapped to the side of the rockhopper. After a bit of thought he gave piloting responsibility for the rockhopper to Ryan, with Estrela riding as passenger, and ceded Tana her perch on the top. It was a good place for her to scout for obstacles anyway, although he would have never allowed it initially, had he known. He and Trevor went ahead on foot along the route that he had memorized from the ledge above. Since the rockhopper had to pick a slow path over the broken terrain, they were as fast on foot as the rockhopper was.