“No, it’s not,” Conn said. “We’re going to carry half the weight we planned. We’re making it a one-way trip.”
# # #
Conn flew to Texas to visit Grant. He’d been taken to the hospital again.
She looked forward to telling him about going to Mars. He would think she was foolish, but he wouldn’t say so. He would worry about her, but he wouldn’t say that, either. He would be proud of her. That, he would say, and show.
Her hired car pulled up to the hospital entrance, and she emerged again into the oppressive heat of Houston. A gust that should have been welcome blew her hair into a staticky mess in the ten feet from the car to the door. She visited the women’s room off the lobby to fix it.
She went to Grant’s floor, to his door, and Grant was not there. Had he gone home?
No, he hadn’t.
She retreated to the lobby in a fog, her ears ringing. She stood there not remembering what to do next, until a security guard asked her if she needed help. “No. Thank you,” she said. The exchange cleared her head some.
Nobody had told her. Nobody foned or e-mailed or so much as sent a byte. She was mad at the hospital. Then she was mad at Grant, for not telling the hospital or his mother or somebody to contact her. Stupid, thoughtless, unsympathetic Grant. The jerk who in college on Valentine’s Day had sent her roses in each one of her classes. She remembered that well. It was one of the things that made her realize they weren’t going to work out together.
Because who would want someone that . . . committed in their life?
She wasn’t ready to remember making love with him, or his being the first guy she’d ever let into her life. She just plucked that factoid out of the ether and looked it over. He’d been her first boyfriend, the first guy she had ever really been with. That’s right, he had. Huh. What do you know. The guy who had been her first serious relationship had died.
She remembered everything she’d gone through to rescue Grant on Tethys and bring him home alive, and she was mad at him all over again. For giving up what she’d worked so hard to save. For making all those efforts moot.
She found a cab outside with its light on. She got in. She wondered on the ride back to the airport how she had ever loved such a jerk.
TWELVE
Departure
March - December, 2038
Grant’s funeral was almost as well-attended as the memorial unveiling for the Sirius astronauts. Conn didn’t stay long. When she showed up, an agitated, loud knot of feed reporters stuck fones in her face. They wanted her to make news, by breaking down, by remaining too stoic, by lashing out at them. How did Conn feel about losing the man she had rescued from Saturn’s orbit? How did Conn react when she heard the news? What was Conn going to do now? She gave Grant’s family her condolences and said it was best if she left. Mom made a show of disagreeing, but Dad seemed irritated by the press and grateful she was leaving.
The world learned about the Dyna-Tech mission to Mars in mid-March. The public still thought Conn’s expedition would leave in March, 2039—Stoll had never publicized any change in departure time to December. The feeds sought out Conn to ask whether the mission was still a go, and if so, why. Conn made the strategic decision to continue not to tell about the change to December. She said that everybody had worked very hard on the expedition and it was still a go, though Marcus Stoll wouldn’t have as much of a hands-on role as before.
In April, the world got its first look at the Dyna-Tech command module. Conn barely recognized her old bird under an expanded fuselage, equipment for building portals attached to the outside, solar panels, and a dish antenna. It looked cobbled together, because in essence it had been. The public loved it.
In contrast, Stoll’s money and attention had made the Indian Mars-liner sleek and almost intimidating-looking. Its solar panels were in a formation that looked like bat wings. Only the dish antenna spoiled its symmetry. Conn wanted to limit her trips to the spacecraft to one every other month, not only to save money, but because she didn’t want to micromanage the way Stoll had. But she saw firsthand that it was coming along just fine, and a December departure would not be a problem.
The lander would be much lighter than planned, too. It wouldn’t need enough fuel to achieve escape velocity on the way back—it wouldn’t need an ascent engine at all. The lander was staying on Mars.
None of this was common knowledge, nor anybody’s business. The logistics people and the astronauts knew that they would carry enough fuel and supplies to get to Mars, and then use Yongpo’s Dyna-Tech portals to get back to Earth. Conn made sure nobody else did. That part didn’t leak.
Even Dyna-Tech wasn’t counting on using the portals to get their astronauts home. One would go home that way, if everything went right, but the other two would take the long way home—and they were fully equipped and fueled for a return trip for three in case anything went awry. When it came to Conn and her group, if anything went awry, there was nothing they would be able to do about it.
Conn believed in Luan Yongpo: that was the crux of the matter. The portals would work. In fact, Yongpo (sworn to secrecy the same as the logistics people and astronauts) had heard about Conn’s audacious plan, and had tried to talk her out of it—but not wholeheartedly. That told Conn he really believed it would work. She recognized that some of it may have been that Yongpo knew he couldn’t dissuade her, but Yongpo believed in his tech. So Conn did too.
Dyna-Tech revealed its arrival date in May: July seventh, 2039. Conn and company were scheduled to arrive July tenth, and land on the eleventh. Conn was determined to beat Dyna-Tech.
“I just need ten days,” Conn told Liam and his fellow logistics people. “Ten lousy days. How hard is that?”
“Why ten? They’re getting there three days before we are.”
“If they’re really arriving July seventh, I’ll eat your hat. No, if they’re saying the seventh, they’re getting there earlier.”
Ten days was very hard. The most Liam and company could reduce the journey by was six.
“And that’s at the expense of some redundant systems,” they warned. “Stuff you hope you won’t have to use but . . .” Conn said she understood.
She told the astronauts about the revised arrival date of July fourth.
“What happens when Dyna-Tech suddenly finds a way to get there quicker?”
“I don’t think they can do it. Not that heavy.”
As Conn suspected, they had been sandbagging, and soon they revised their arrival date to July third. They had to have been trying to lure Conn’s group into an arrival later in July. They couldn’t have shaved four days off their trip.
Conn was still confident. “We’ll land first,” Conn said. “They’re going to put together two portals on Phobos first, before landing on the planet. Trust me. They’re not going to be ready to land before we are.”
“You know for sure how long it’ll take to put up a gate?”
That was a question for Yongpo.
“How long will it take to put two portals together on Phobos?”
“Assembly, power up, testing? It can all be done in a day. The structure is pre-built and attached to the outside of the spacecraft, they just have to put the pieces together. What might trip them up? They have to find a good place to put them. Phobos is not smooth,” Yongpo said. It was a captured asteroid. “They will budget two days, but they can be done in one.”
Conn would plan for it to take a day. She would have preferred two days, but she was still right—they would land before Daniels and De Maria did.
She hoped.
# # #
Conn’s physical fitness was atrocious after so long in space going to and from the Aphelial system, and idleness after that. By mid-July she was wondering whether she would be ready in five months.
She didn’t send herself to Devon Island, nor did she practice water survival again. But she spent many, many hours in the simulators. Ryan and Ginny were happy to have the chance to kill her ov
er and over again, instead of the other way around.
Ryan would be the main pilot of the lander, but Conn had to study flying the craft as though she would be the pilot, in order to be ready in case something happened. She started out with too light a touch using the engines to brake, and she smashed the lander to pieces dozens of times.
Simulated Mars gravity was difficult to get used to, after two landings on the moon. She felt too light, oddly enough.
It wasn’t until the end of October that Conn shook the sense that her going to Mars was a terrible idea. By then she was back in shape, and crashing the lander far less. She would be grateful for another six weeks, but the departure date didn’t seem too soon anymore.
The Dyna-Tech expedition launched the Saturday before Thanksgiving in America. They had stuck to a public arrival date of July third.
By the launch of the Dyna-Tech expedition, Conn had yet to release an official arrival date, not wanting to give Dyna-Tech incentive to change theirs again. Most everybody assumed that they couldn’t beat Dyna-Tech to Mars. They would leave more than a month later. The biggest question the feeds had for them, over and over, was “Why go at all?”
Conn got herself interviewed on NewsAmerica’s Mars feed. She broke the news: her expedition would arrive the day after Dyna-Tech. She didn’t mention her conviction that Dyna-Tech would need a day to put up their portals on Phobos.
“Once you arrive, how long before you can land?” the interviewer asked her.
“Arrival will be very intense, Olivia. You don’t have GPS to pinpoint where you are. One false move and you’re skipping off Mars’ atmosphere and on your way to Jupiter, or else you’re burning up in the same atmosphere. We can’t commit to landing immediately after we achieve a stable orbit. But I can’t say for sure how we’ll feel once we get there.”
Olivia Worth thanked Conn at the end of the interview, and told her that it was a shame they were going to miss being the first on Mars by a day. Conn just shrugged.
# # #
They would be riding an EMSpace Ares-VII to Gasoline Alley, and launching from there. As the weeks passed, Conn half expected someone at Dyna-Tech to kick her spacecraft off of the Dyna-Tech space station. But Conn’s money, like Stoll’s before her, was good. Come the second week of December, the spacecraft and the lander were ready—just—and the astronauts were anxious to leave.
The three of them traveled to EMSpace’s launch facility at Cape Canaveral. Three days of quarantine and thorough medical evaluations to assure them they wouldn’t carry any illnesses with them on a nearly seven-month journey.
December seventeenth, it was time to suit up and go. Ginny had been to space an even dozen times, but Ryan only twice. The women pretended not to notice that he had to excuse himself and throw up.
Conn no longer thought there was anything going on between Ginny and Ryan, nor did she think there had been. It seemed to her that she saw genuine camaraderie as something different. She was reluctant to ask Ginny, though. Which was stupid, Conn knew, because she was paying for all this now, and also had her life in Ginny’s and Ryan’s hands. But she was confident enough she was right that she never asked.
Unlike for her jaunt to the Aphelial system, for the Mars mission Conn obtained enough of her bipolar medication to last the trip. To save weight, she had her dosage changed to every eighteen instead of every twelve hours. Many fewer pills that way—she took three different kinds. Ryan was medicated for anxiety, and also carried seven months’ worth of pills. Conn was grateful that the doctor and pharmacist who helped them out didn’t make a big deal about them not having enough medicine for a supposed return trip. That was still a secret from the public. And Dyna-Tech.
It was a miracle it was still a secret, and Conn wondered how she had managed it. She kept the information confined to logistics and the astronauts, true, but then they had made the command module and especially the lander lighter, the spacecraft was fueled only “halfway,” the astronauts’ loved ones knew they would only be gone eight months or so, there were a dozen ways it could have got out. That it didn’t leak was sheer luck, combined with the fact that in truth, not many people cared about their expedition, or were paying attention to it.
Beating Dyna-Tech to the surface would change that.
The three astronauts climbed the last twenty feet to their capsule up a ladder, and seated and strapped themselves in. They used winches to tighten the straps.
When operations went around and asked each discipline whether they were go or no-go for flight, everybody sounded enthusiastic, to Conn. Including Ginny, who responded to “spacecraft?” with a full-throated “go!” and a whoop.
Ryan looked green as the countdown got to the point where they were saying every number.
As the countdown reached three . . . two . . . one, Conn closed her eyes and mouthed, “Here I go, Peo.”
This was routine for Conn and Ginny, but it was only Ryan’s third trip into space. His body still fought against the heaviness and stress of liftoff as though it wasn’t temporary. Conn knew the trick by then: just let it happen. It won’t last long. Her heart would be able to pump normally again; her lungs could fill themselves up soon. The sensation felt to her a lot like how she felt returning to Earth after more than a year in space.
After two and a half orbits of the Earth, they arrived at the space station, everyone in one piece. The astronauts EVA’ed to the refitted Indian spacecraft, lean and light. As intimidating as Conn could imagine the spacecraft looking, the refurbished capsule that had been turned into a lander looked ridiculous. No one would look at it and expect it to be able to fly. Well, it didn’t: it just had to fall. Softly.
With all aboard, the spacecraft took off for a rendezvous with Venus.
THIRTEEN
Are We There Yet?
December, 2038 - June, 2039
As Conn knew well, you could pack a moon mission full of science to do and still have downtime on the way there and the way back. And her travel to and from Mizar and Alcor hadn’t made her enjoy tedium any more. She was going stir crazy before they so much as entered the gravitational influence of Venus.
So was Ryan. Ginny, thank goodness, seemed to be normal. Ryan had gotten uglier and more foul-tempered as they made their way to Venus. It made Conn and Ginny bond tighter, which then made Ryan paranoid.
The spacecraft had a common area, as well as three “pods” with limited privacy, and a waste collection station with a curtain around it. For the first two or three weeks, the astronauts spent most of their waking time in the common area. After that, they all started to spend more of their time in private, when they had downtime. Which was often.
One March evening, Conn solved the NYT feed Sunday crossword puzzle from November 26, 2028. It was evening in Carson City, Nevada, where Conn’s operations people were—they had rented EMSpace’s operations center; the troubled company didn’t have many launches or missions planned. Evening in Nevada meant evening for the spacecraft, too. Every evening, Conn, Ryan and Ginny had dinner, followed by crossword puzzles.
Callie Leporis had come up with the crossword puzzle idea when she had been in command of the mission to Saturn. They were mandatory. They kept the astronauts’ minds keen, and immersed them in something that wasn’t related to spaceflight. Conn hated them.
Their days were tightly structured. Muscle stretching for at least half an hour first thing in the morning, followed by breakfast, followed by a morning briefing from operations—what was going on in the world, telemetry and other need-to-know data, updates on the progress of the Dyna-Tech expedition. (By March it was halfway to Mars, a month or two from using the sun’s magnetic field to begin to brake.)
After the briefing came maintenance, which included daily chores like cleaning up. It was during this morning maintenance when Ryan would most often let his temper get the best of him, reacting to imagined slights. On bad days, which increased in number as the voyage went on, his mood would last the rest of the day. After m
aintenance there was science to do or experiments already set up for which data had to be collected. Sometimes this took a while; often, it didn’t. There was free time until lunch.
After lunch, a mandatory period for each member of the crew to write about his or her day in a journal, or speak about it in a video journal. Ginny and Ryan opted to write, for privacy’s sake. Conn felt she should be more open, so hers was a video log. Doing this also made it easier for the feeds covering the voyage—slim in number as they were.
Several public and private entities wanted to study the effects of months of being together in close quarters. It was important for them to be thorough in the journals about what was going on. It was also something to do. Ryan often got paranoid during the journal period of the day, thinking Ginny was writing awful things about him. (Sometimes, she was.)
Once journal entries were concluded, there was free time until more stretching, then more maintenance, as necessary. The crew then would watch a film or episodes of a show together, to promote camaraderie. In Conn’s opinion, this would be vital to the sanity of the crew. As would game time, next, where they would most often play cards.
Dinner came next, then crossword puzzles.
This particular March evening, shortly after Conn realized that former Buffalo, NY football team, B-I-blank-blank-blank, was not BISON, and everything in her puzzle came together for her, the spacecraft shuddered.
Ryan and Ginny both felt and heard it, too. They knew that a strange noise coming from their car usually wasn’t a big deal, but the same thing on a spacecraft bound for another planet could be life-threatening. Conn organized their search and had the astronauts call out when they checked something, so work wouldn’t be duplicated. None of the three could find the cause after a thorough search.
Carson City was on the fone with one of the main architects of the vehicle as he hurried to the operations center. He had three great suggestions that didn’t pan out on examination.
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