Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium
Page 1
MARS WARS
___________
Abyss of
Elysium
Dennis Chamberland
Other Books by Dennis Chamberland
Consuming Fire
Proverbs for My Children
Aaron Seven - Quantum Storms
By Dennis and Claudia Chamberland
The Proxima Manual of Space Exploration
Coming:
Aaron Seven - Abyss of Space: The Parallel Novel to Abyss of Elysium
All books are available either in hard copy or in nearly every popular e-book format from:
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Mars Wars
Quantum Editions
Orlando – Chattanooga – Washington D.C.
Abyss of Elysium
Dennis Chamberland
Cover art by Christopher Chamberland
Interior illustrations by Brett W. English and Peter D. Chamberland
All photos and maps obtained from the public domain – National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S Geological Survey.
A Quantum Editions 1st Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other – without written permission from the author or publisher.
Persons and places described in this novel are strictly fictional. Any characterization, likeness or relation to any person living or dead is strictly coincidental and unintended. The author endeavored to make this story as scientifically and technically realistic and detailed as possible. However, any policy, idea or concept stated herein is solely based on the opinion of the author and is not related in any way to anyone’s actual endorsement of any organizational or privately sponsored practice or any national procedure, plan, guideline or process. Concepts and ideas stated herein were solely developed to move a fictional story along a predetermined path to an imagined conclusion. Quantum Editions is a registered publisher – R.R. Bowker and Books in Print
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chamberland, Dennis, 1951-
Mars wars : abyss of Elysium / Dennis Chamberland.-- 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Mars (Planet)--Fiction. 2. Space colonies--Fiction. 3. Space warfare--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.H337M37 2004
813'.54--dc22
2004002070
ISBN 1-889422-03-7
Copyright © 2004 by Dennis Chamberland
To
William M. Knott III
NASA Scientist, Boss, Mentor, Friend
And to the Kennedy Space Center’s
space life sciences team he founded
and led so brilliantly.
The very best and the brightest,
carving out the path to tomorrow’s worlds,
whole new human civilizations and frontiers -
blazing that single path that everyone else must follow.
And in Memory of
Richard S. Young
NASA Program Manager for the
Mars Viking Missions
Who sat with me for endless hours on countless
pre-dawn Cape Canaveral mornings
teaching all-things-Mars.
He left a legacy of exploration and discovery.
He also left the world another Marsphile to take his place.
Foreword
Human beings are not easily satisfied. There are always new adventures to be dreamed, unexplored regions to explore, and new frontiers to be settled. Just as humankind left low earth orbit for the moon, so they will leave earthly and lunar orbits for Mars.
In this work, Dennis Chamberland weaves a tale of adventure, exploration and settlement, all rolled into a single sci-fi story of interplanetary destiny. It has been said that life is what happens after you make plans. So it is that missions are what happen after you train. After all, training for space missions is little more than training for the unexpected. In Abyss of Elysium, Dennis has written a story that goes well with that maxim – complete with mystery, intrigue, adventure and emotional impact consistent with the full expression of historic human destiny. Between these pages, exactly as in reality, few aspects of any mission go according to best laid plans; but in the end, this reality is what makes true discovery and exploration authentic adventure.
Dennis is a space systems engineer who brings more to these pages than just an ability to tell a good story. He imparts to the genre wide, professional experience which lends credence to a captivating tale and weaves uncommon reality into a story of likely proportions. Here he describes an alien world of deep cold; one whose atmosphere is but a small fraction of the earth’s, but paradoxically is capable of spinning winds and storms of hundreds of kilometers per hour and twisters capable of intense destruction.
One true nugget found inside this book is Dennis’ insight into advanced space life support systems and the engineered structures that work quietly to keep everyone alive in space. Every astronaut would like nothing more on any given space mission than to concentrate entirely on the assigned tasks and let the silent and invisible systems work their automated magic in the background. But as I found out on my own mission, the most important human talent not duplicated by the robot is the ability to react properly to unforeseen circumstances and to pull things together, even out of imminent disaster. My colleagues on Apollo 13 discovered just how important those invisible systems are when the nominal mission plan goes south. Intense and effective planning and training usually leads to relatively uneventful and successful missions. But sometimes it leads to just making it back home alive after a bad day. Either way, the object is to make the number of successful landings equal to the number of successful launches, and the bean-counting of mission success is always secondary to the glorious reality of homecoming.
Dennis has created a whole new world on Mars. The tale is fiction, of course, but it is a good one, woven together with fact and sound engineering, and it is a memorable account that will keep you turning the pages until the end. It is the kind of story that will lead to real life imitating fiction one day; a kind of irony of facts that lead to fiction later turning into a new reality. It is a book seeded with accurate science and laced together with all the human characters and their unscientific emotions that ultimately lead to the founding of a new society on a distant planet spinning millions of miles away in space.
Dennis has his own real-life experiences with such adventures in the space analog - undersea habitat he designed, built and commanded on seven missions over two years. He found out for himself just how things go as real life interposes itself on the carefully crafted plans of bureaucracies and men. But I’ll leave it to Dennis to unfold that particular story in his time. Until then, it is off to Mars now and down into the Abyss of Elysium.
Scott Carpenter
Vail, Colorado
“There can be no discovery without first engaging the mind. But discovery alone is empty and impotent without likewise engaging the heart. It is inside these fleshy chambers of heart and mind that a critical mass is formed by the breathtaking fusion of sheer, brittle intellect and tender human emotion. It is from this astonishing unity that the energy of every great discovery and every magnificent achievement is created then released to the world as the pure light of creative genius.”
Dennis Chamberland
In Remarks to the Harvard Club of New York
October,1991
1
The Elysium Desert Mars
ithout warning, out of season and just out of view, an enormous dome of high pressure air, millions of square kilometers in area, collapsed. As the super-cooled gas fell from the high atmosphere, it poured down the slopes toward the deserts and began to turn, deliberately following the rotation of the planet. Quickly its circulation became self sustaining and in the thin, cold environment of the red planet it reached speeds of over three hundred kilometers per hour. Scourging the Martian landscape, it picked up dust particles from the sandy slopes and tortuously wrinkled gorges. Gaining momentum as it fell across the landscape, the huge gyre tightened, accelerating and drawing up even more dust in its powerful maw as it expanded into a fully developed redwind.
Some distance away, just over the horizon, unaware of and unprepared for the approaching wall of wind, Colonist Peter Traynor rested on his knees in the fine orange sand and surveyed his land of paradise. He was protected from the near vacuum and bitter, deep cold by his pressurized suit and bulbous helmet. As he knelt on the red desert, his bright, white suit contrasted with the ruddy sands, his face nearly invisible through the gold, rounded visor of his helmet.
His eyes scanned the vast Martian plain, sprawling across the planet's equatorial deserts to form this place called Elysium. Unlike its mythological namesake, it bore no resemblance to a paradise at all and offered no perfect eternal repose for the dead. Its expansive regions were no more than desiccated wastelands; immense boulder fields whose only travelers over the epochs of geologic time were, until now, endless parades of dunes hurried along by the thin Martian winds.
Yet, it was this bizarre world, this Elysium paradise, for which Peter Traynor had sacrificed everything. He vowed that this was his new home, his new life which he would never leave again, not even for the planet of his birth.
The knees of his white suit cut into the powdery sand that had already soiled and discolored it. He sighed contentedly at his complex and dangerous world, this planet he was claiming with his sweat and muscle for himself and his children to be.
Peter glanced some ten meters to his right where Ashley Alcyone worked steadily, also kneeling in the sand. They were coworkers who shared a common dream to live out their lives on Mars. They also shared their lives. Meeting during training, they had fallen in love and had been secretly married just before leaving for Mars rather than wait for a future mission when the planet was deemed suitable enough to support families. Soulmates that shared the same awe and fascination for this bizarre paradise, they planned to spend their lives together here.
Peter finally returned to his task, driving the seismic probe into the stubborn soil with a rubber capped spike driver. This probe was especially stubborn. It felt almost like he was driving it through steel.
Tunishiawa See, known as Toon to all his friends, was the chief computer engineer at the American base. He worked outside the Mars All Terrain Vehicle, known as a MAT, located some 50 or 60 meters away, wiring probes for Peter and Ashley.
Peter stopped to rest his arm again. Setting this particular seismic probe was more difficult than any of the others. He looked at the marred head of the instrument, now misshapen with frequent hammer blows. It perplexed him that a device designed to pass through the upper sediment with relative ease would be so stubborn.
But this moment of inattention to the task at hand may have saved their lives. Peter looked up at the slight motion on the horizon to recognize the approaching redwind, swift and unrelenting, bearing down on them at 300 kilometers per hour.
For eons, such redwinds were the single most profound agents of change on this planet. Now, this wind, in the blink of a human eye, was about to change her newly-arrived inhabitants lives as well.
"Redwind!" Peter shouted, immediately looking toward Ashley.
He could see her helmet rotate up just as he dropped his hammer and rushed toward her.
"Ashley, get... MAT hurry!" he warned through a broken transmission. But she needed no encouragement. Dropping everything, she sprinted as fast as possible toward the MAT. Peter watched from a distance as Toon arrived at the MAT first and switched on the high intensity navigation beams. Still hanging half out of the door, Toon kicked its electric drive into gear. Operating the drive with his hands, he swung the MAT around to face Peter and Ashley just as he was engulfed by the cloud front.
Peter and Ashley collided blindly and fell to the sand in the gathering, blood-red diffusion of light. Their hands grasped for each other on the ground. Peter felt for her shoulders, able to see only parts of her Environmental Protection Suit, or EPS, through the whipping, swirling dust and gathering blackness. He felt her struggling to sit up and forced her shoulders to the ground.
"Ashley, stop; stop for a second!" Peter shouted into his lip mike.
Her body partially relaxed as he gripped her shoulders. Straddling her he pressed his face plate to hers. He could just barely see her face, dimly illuminated by the green lighted indicators in her helmet. The dust quickly curled across their mated face plates, blurring further his muted vision of Ashley. He could make out her eyes, wide with panic, flashing about through nearly total darkness. He forced her helmet down as she tried to push him away.
"Ashley, look up at me! Ashley, look up!"
Finally Peter could see her eyes focus. Her body relaxed immediately as if the clear sight of him had ended her claustrophobic vertigo. She gasped several times then closed her eyes.
"Okay, now what," she asked calmly and more characteristically.
"Are you okay now?" he yelled into his lip mike.
"Yes… I'm fine,” she replied haltingly.
“Keep talking, guys, I should be heading straight toward you," Toon said excited but reassuringly over the common communications circuit.
"Toon, stop the MAT! You'll run us over!" Peter yelled again.
"Okay, I'm stopped."
"Now let's all just relax for one second while we get our bearings," Peter instructed. "Toon, we’re lying on the ground together about 50 meters from where the MAT was parked. “You were able to point it in our direction before you lost us, right?"
"Yes."
"How far do you estimate you are from us now?"
"About 15 meters."
"Can you guess what your error radius might be?"
"No more than 5 meters."
Peter focused on the facts, still astride Ashley, holding her tightly to the ground. Already the dust clung to and coated their visors. He still held her hands, tightly folded across her breasts. He sat upright in the swirling murk and breathed hard, straining to see, feeling lost but still in control.
"We're going to come to you,” Peter stated with finality. "Toon, I want you to turn the hi‑beams on."
"They're already on, Peter."
"Ashley, I'm going to stand up. You keep a hand on me. Don't lose me. When I'm all the way up, feel along my leg until you reach my tool belt in the back. Lock your hands around that and don't let go. If you do lose me, stop immediately where you are and kneel on the ground."
Peter slowly stood up against the Martian wind. Although it whipped by him at hundreds of kilometers per hour, he had no trouble standing against it. The Martian air was so thin, nearly a vacuum by earth standards, that even such a velocity offered little resistance. This wind in a near vacuum served only to magnify the deep cold of the Martian air, mixing and robbing the lower layers of the energy of captured sunlight near the ground.
The wind exerted a steady, even pressure against him. Unlike even a mild earth wind, here there were no violent gusts to upset him. The Martin redwind lent a nearly even, horizontal pressure.
"Okay, Ashley, I'm standing now. Come on up."
He could feel her hands work up his legs from behind. He reached a glove behind him, groping to assist her but she couldn't see it. Running her hands along the seat of his pressure suit she found his belt and pulled herself up.
"Okay I'm up. Nice buns."
"Get a room!" Toon snickered over the
circuit.
"Both hands, Ashley," Peter added firmly with no trace of humor. He could feel her grip his belt tightly. He raised one arm and wiped the dust away from his visor with his glove. The minute, microscopic powder fell away in streaming, fine lines and drifted around his visor with the wind. Immediately it began to accumulate again.
Quickly he summarized the situation. He had chosen to walk to the MAT as the less hazardous of the available alternatives. His reasoning was obvious: they were slower and more deliberate than the MAT and had less mass so that any chance encounter would not be as dangerous.
Visibility was as near to zero as possible and what sunlight existed was quickly diminishing in the building cloud. Even the MAT's high intensity navigation beams would have no more than a meter's range in this dust, if that. Peter knew their chances of walking, unassisted, squarely into the MAT were less than 50‑50. In this soupy darkness they could walk within an arms length of the vehicle and miss it all together. They would have to rely on an assist from the MAT's weak external sound system called the ESS.
"Toon, is the ESS operational?"
"Yes, but I seriously doubt if it's going to carry very far here," Toon replied skeptically.
The ESS was used only in the pressurized environment of the domes for calibrating and setting the navigation instruments. The atmospheric pressure of Mars was so low that sound, for all practical purposes, did not transmit in its near vacuum. Outside communications were carried on exclusively by the suits’ radio transmitters. But Peter had a theory.