by Read, John
Then, there was silence. We jerked forward in our seats as we returned to zero G.
“Orbital insertion successful,” the computer stated. “Shuttle docking will occur at one p.m. Martian standard time.”
“Well, that was fun,” Leeth said. “Do you have time for an early lunch?”
“I think I’ll go pack my things,” I said, unbuckling my seatbelt.
“Alright. Just remember, this is our last taste of space chow, from now on, it’s autofarm fruits, factory vegetables, and vat beef.”
“That’s a sad thought,” I said, rolling my eyes.
I took a final look at my stateroom, my home for the past six months. The room’s display showed a slideshow of Marie and Branson. A shrine to my past life. In Vegas, I had purchased the matching Washington Capitals ball cap my son used to wear. It was the one personal item that meant the most to me. I retrieved the hat from its place by the window, placed it in the bag and left the room.
There was still another hour until the Martian shuttle would arrive. I decided to head up to the galley to grab lunch.
I floated up to the galley to find Leeth still there. He motioned to a spot around the table next to a starboard window. This was Leeth’s favorite place to sit. From the table he could see out the windows in the theater, as well as out the side windows. Using a Velcro strap, I fastened my saddlebags to a rail, and slid my feet into designated foot holders.
“Anxious to get down to the surface I see,” Leeth said, taking a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
“Yeah well, you know what my philosophy is,” I said, waiting for Leeth to reply. He didn’t. “If it needs doing, do it now.”
“I like my philosophy better,” Leeth said. “Eat first, lose your luggage and have it delivered to you by the airline. That way, you don’t need to carry it to your hotel.”
“I’m not sure this airline will deliver your stuff if you leave it on board,” I said.
“Well, it’s worth a shot,” Leeth said.
I floated over to the food dispenser and selected mac and cheese. The auto-kitchen assembled, heated, and served the food in about thirty seconds. I grabbed a drinking bottle and filled it with coffee. Back at the table, I set the bowl and bottle down, feeling the magnets tug the items to the surface.
“Hey check it out,” Leeth said, motioning with a nod to the nearest window.
“Right on time,” I said. The shuttle’s thrusters fired, aligning the spacecraft to the Mayflower’s docking port.
The Martian shuttle was quite a bit different than the one we had taken from Earth. The Earth-based shuttle had short wings designed for landing in a thick atmosphere. The Martian shuttle’s wings formed a giant triangle around the entire fuselage. Landing on a Martian runway was pretty similar to Earth, but Mars required a much higher approach speed to compensate for the thin atmosphere.
From our table in the galley, we watched as the shuttle made its final approach to dock with the cruiser. The shuttle banked as it approached and I saw the docking port located on the shuttle’s nose. The shuttle connected with the Mayflower head-on, as if it were giving our spaceship a kiss on the cheek.
A few minutes later the hatch opened and a woman floated in. She wore a white jumpsuit with the COTS logo printed across the chest. Her brown hair floated in a spiral. She reached for a microphone connected to the wall.
Before she could say anything, Leeth yelled. “G’day Martian!”
“Hi there!” she called. She looked no older than twenty.
“Don’t mind him, he’s drunk,” I called. Leeth wasn’t actually drunk, yet, but he did get louder with each additional shot.
The woman looked at Leeth, then smiled, and winked. Then pressing the button on the microphone said with a drawl, “Welcome to Mars orbit! I hope y’all enjoyed the flight.” I looked around at the people floating nearby. They were nodding.
“I’ll be your flight attendant for the descent down to the planet. Please collect all carry-on items and come aboard the shuttle at your earliest convenience. We’ll depart for Mars in exactly thirty minutes.”
I expected Leeth to excuse himself while he went to gather his things, but this didn’t happen. “You packed everything in your checked bags didn’t you?” I asked, giving Leeth an inquisitive look.
“Yup,” he answered. “Don’t you know your first bag flies for free?”
Leeth and I boarded first, grabbing the seats in the front row. We watched as the rest of the passengers trickled in.
“You know mate, I think you were the oldest person onboard,” Leeth said.
“Thanks,” I said, “When you turn thirty-two, I’ll skip the party.”
“When I’m thirty-two, I’ll be back on Earth and retired,” Leeth said.
“Uh huh.”
Once everyone was aboard, the flight attendant floated up and down the aisles. When she was confident that every seat was filled and every overhead bin secure, she fastened herself into a jump seat near the hatch across from Leeth.
“No safety briefing?” Leeth asked.
“Haha, no,” the attendant replied with a warm chuckle. “If anything goes wrong, we’ll crash into the surface of Mars at five thousand miles per hour.”
“Oh, too right,” Leeth said and leaned back in his seat, giving me a mocking look, and taking another swig from his flask.
We heard a clunk, and I looked across the aisle and out the port windows. We had detached from the Mayflower and were drifting away from the larger spacecraft.
Once we were sufficiently clear of the Mayflower, a computerized voice reverberated through the cabin. “Thirty seconds to deorbit burn,” it said.
Unlike the launch from Earth, and the two orbital transfer burns on the Martian Transport, this engine firing was barely noticeable. The shuttle’s nose pitched up and hissing noises sounded through the cabin.
The shuttle attendant looked bored.
“That’s it?” Leeth asked.
“That’s it, I guess,” I said. “We’re going down!”
We heard a twisting sound, like a winch pulling a heavy object. I looked out the window, and watched the spacecraft’s control surfaces cycling through a check phase in preparation for our decent. Just like an airliner, there were slats, flaps, ailerons, and dive brakes. The bottoms of the wings were covered in a tan-colored heat shield.
We reached the upper regions of the Martian atmosphere and the wings began to glow.
“Leeth, hand me your flask,” I said.
“It’s almost empty, mate!” he protested.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to drink it!”
Leeth passed me the flask. I held the flask two feet above my lap and let it go. The flask floated down, taking thirty seconds to reach my thighs, but the result was obvious.
Gravity!
“Let me give it a go!” Leeth said. I handed back the flask and then looked out the window. The wing glowed brighter than before. Orange and red flames flickered up and over the leading edge.
Leeth held the flask over his head and dropped it down into his lap. This time, it took only ten seconds to cover the distance.
Out the window, the view of the wing was replaced by a blur of yellow and grey, as flames of ionized particles engulfed the shuttle. After another minute, the view of the wing returned, this time without the flames.
Leeth was still picking up the flask and dropping it into his lap. By now, the flask fell in less than a second. My head felt heavy and my arm wanted nothing more than to rest on the armrest.
We flew over mountains and canyons and I realized that the Martian landscape contained a wide variety of color. There were reds, oranges, yellows and browns in every conceivable hue.
Lower and lower we descended, traveling almost a third of the way around the planet as we decelerated from orbit. The ground rushed by faster and faster as we continued to lose altitude. The shuttle began to bank, conducting a series of S-turns to bleed off speed and altitude.
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��One minute until landing,” the computer announced as we approached the runway at one thousand miles per hour.
“You do this every day?” I asked the flight attendant.
“Yup,” she said, maintaining her bored expression. She probably made this trip dozens of times each launch window.
Right before we landed, the shuttle passed over an array of solar panels and some dump trucks driving down a red dirt road. Nothing like real estate near the airport, I thought.
The shuttle hit the runway with a lurch and the wings pitched downward. Thrusters fired and brakes screeched. I pressed down on the armrests to keep my back against the seat. For almost a full minute, the sound of rockets, wind, and rumbling tires filled the cabin. Then there was silence.
The attendant picked a phone from the wall. “Welcome to Mars! I hope y’all enjoyed your flight.” She started clapping and several other folks began clapping, as well. Then, someone started cheering and other people joined in, escalating the din. Soon, the entire shuttle was full of hoots and hollers.
Once everyone had calmed down, the attendant continued. “Please remain in your seats until the shuttle is safely parked at the gate and the hatch has been opened. Use extra caution when exiting the shuttle, as most of you will experience trouble walking after several months in zero G. You will find walkers and wheelchairs located just inside of the terminal.”
She took a deep breath and continued, “Each of you has been assigned a representative to pick you up in the arrivals area. For those of you with checked luggage, please collect your bags from the carousel in the terminal.” It amazed me that after over a hundred years of air and space travel, a baggage carousel was still considered an efficient way to deliver bags.
The shuttle continued down a taxiway and across a tarmac. From the window I could see two gates. The jetways were cylindrical, which meant they were pressurized.
The shuttle came to rest at the gate. There was a hiss-pop and the hatch opened. The sound of moaning reverberated through the cabin as everyone aboard attempted to stand.
“Gahh!” Leeth said, “It feels like I’m wearing a lead vest!”
I tried to stand. “This is tough,” I said.
A line of limping and sluggish individuals formed in the aisle. Leeth stood up and supported himself by resting a hand on the seat across from him. He opened the overhead bin and passed me a bag. Even at one-third Earth’s gravity, the bags felt twice as heavy as they should.
Leeth and I were the first to leave the shuttle. After limping up the jetway, I looked back. It was like watching a zombie movie, dozens of people hunched over, stumbling up the ramp. One person lost their lunch.
Leeth entered the terminal first. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” he yelled, then laughed hysterically. “Look at this, mate!”
I chuckled. Right in front of us was a line of old people walkers, with tennis balls on each of the legs. Leeth went over and grabbed one.
“Don’t. Just don’t,” I said.
“Well I say, sonny,” he said, doing his best old lady impression. “Don’t you look spry for a young guy?”
I let go of the railing and took my first unsupported steps. I’ll be fine. As nauseating as the Mayflower’s treadmill had been, it helped to mitigate the gravity shock.
We followed the signs to the baggage claim area and terminal exit. Leeth was the only person to use a walker and he did it just to be funny. Other people hopped onto golf carts and drove themselves to the exit, beeping the little horn as they tried to navigate around Leeth, who was limping down the center of the corridor.
In the arrivals area, several folks stood around holding up tablets with names displayed in big letters. I scanned the room and saw “Orville.”
The man holding my name was a tall handsome fellow of South Asian complexion. He stood leaning against a column and looked rather bored.
“John Orville,” I said, walking up to the man, reaching out my hand.
“Kevin Patel. Nice to meet you,” he said with a hint of an Indian accent. “Welcome to Mars. My car is right outside.”
Kevin had been born in America but moved to India at age five when his father took a job with the Indian Space Research Organization. Kevin had been fascinated by space from a young age, and went on to get his engineering degree from the Bangalore Institute of Technology. After completing the degree in only three years, he moved back to America where he was accepted to a Masters program at MIT.
I said goodbye to Leeth and we made plans to meet up as soon as we were settled in. With a saddlebag in each hand, I followed Kevin outside. “Outside” was a large glass tube with parking spots running along the terminal and two additional lanes for moving traffic. Several cars drove along the tube, some occupied, some empty.
Harmony Colony’s greenish-blue bridge was visible in the distance, its roadway surrounded by a flexi-glass tube a hundred feet in diameter. Under the bridge, solar arrays glittered blue like an ocean while the arrays on the hillside glittered green like a forest. I squinted, imagining I was looking at a lush valley. Across the bridge, Harmony’s skyline punctuated the landscape with its expansive twelve-dome circumferential, pierced by the larger central dome.
“You know what’s great about Mars?” Kevin said.
I looked at him and shrugged.
“There’s tons of parking,” he answered.
I threw my bags into the trunk and climbed into the passenger’s seat. A small LEGO Starfighter hung from the rearview mirror. “Chocolate bar?” Kevin held up a small brick labeled “Mars.”
I looked at the chocolate bar for a moment, but didn’t reach for it. “It’s a tradition,” Kevin said. I ate the chocolate and let it melt in my mouth.
We left the airport and crossed the bridge leading to the colony. The scale of everything was breathtaking. I’d seen the colony a hundred times in the simulator but being here was different. The domes rose hundreds of feet into the air and the buildings inside took on a bluish tinge from the glass.
Looking to my left, something took me by surprise. I knew the colony’s layout from the simulations on the Mayflower, but there was a new dome, one that wasn’t in the sims.
“That dome, is it new?” I asked.
“That, sir, is the Alamo,” Kevin answered. “A custom-built luxury dome for Mars’s upper, upper, upper class; basically, the CEO, Henry Allen the third, Red Planet executives, and their families. You know about H3, right?”
“Oh yeah, I heard all about him. Eccentric, billionaire, comedic philanthropist,” I said, trying to summarize Leeth’s tabloids.
“Comedic philanthropist,” Kevin repeated. “That’s about right. Although, his work to free zoo animals ended poorly when he set an antelope loose in Beijing.”
“I didn’t hear about that one,” I said.
“No? The antelope got into a local high school,” Kevin said.
“Did anyone get hurt?” I asked.
“No, but the school was investigated for unusually high test scores.”
“I don’t see the correlation.”
“Well, the antelope freaked out because of all the cheetahs.” He paused. “Get it? Cheaters, cheetahs?”
For a moment there was silence. I looked over at Kevin, who was sporting a large grin. I broke out laughing for the first time in a long time.
Part II
I merged into the left lane of the circumferential highway, passing a slower moving autonomous delivery vehicle. It was early, and the sun had just risen above a distant hill. My electric SUV purred along from one dome to the next through the flexi-glass channels. The Martian Council, a small group of volunteers in charge of municipal laws, let us drive our vehicles manually, which was a nice perk. I’d forgotten how much fun piloting a vehicle was this close to the ground.
In the distance, a shuttle glided in on its final approach. It sailed through the wispy Martian atmosphere towards the runway at mind-numbing speed. I didn’t hear it until after it landed, when the whoosh and rumble fina
lly reached my ears. Two Earth years had passed since I landed on Mars. A new launch window had opened and shuttles were arriving daily. Three thousand new colonists were arriving, and my job was to ensure we had enough power to support them.
My team expected this shuttle. It carried engineers from the COTS-Bounty, engineers trained to help deal with Martian storms.
It was springtime on Mars, with mid-day temperatures rising to minus thirty degrees Celsius. We were also approaching perihelion, the point in Mars’s orbit when it’s closest to the sun. This year’s storm probability was expected to be particularly high. On Earth, storms were caused by temperature and pressure differentials. On Mars, high-energy particles from the sun caused static electricity to build up in the atmosphere. The static drew the dust upwards where it was circulated by prevailing winds.
I thought of the video that had played on the Mayflower. One line stuck in my mind: If a planet-wide storm were to occur, we should evacuate, but like on the Titanic, there are simply not enough lifeboats.
Hopefully, this would not be true for much longer.
I pulled into my parking spot at the solar panel distribution center, the PDC. The sky appeared Earthly blue through the tinted dome. A cool breeze carried the scent of lilac across the boulevard. There must have been a temperature variance between the neighboring domes. I wondered if the engineers did that on purpose. If so, it was a nice touch.
I stepped inside the building and a hologram waved hello. The holographic receptionist’s large eyes gave it a puppy face, despite the lack of nose and slit for a mouth. I had been told it resembled a character from Astro Boy, a Japanese cartoon from the 1980s.
“Hey, Linda” I said (all holo-receptionists were named Linda). Linda’s eyes focused on my face, irises dilating as the computer ran a facial recognition scan.
“Good morning, John,” it replied.
Twin sliding doors led into the core of our operation. I found James Rogers, the plant’s foreman, directing some loader drones from a tablet computer. Jimmy was an original member of the infrastructure expansion team and had been on Mars far too long. He had spent his life working with his hands, and Mars was the last of a series of tough jobs. What I did was relatively easy, but Jimmy had been on Mars since the early days.