Nothing was broken. Nothing was so much as out of place. There was no evidence that it had really happened.
“Must be exterior,” the spacecraft designer said. That presented a problem. Any of the astronauts could EVA from the spacecraft to fix something on the exterior, if they absolutely had to. But to go outside to examine everything just in case maybe the problem was on the exterior? Dangerous—too risky for the chance it would pan out.
So the astronauts pressed their faces to the spacecraft’s windows and tried to get a look at as much of the exterior as they could. “Got it,” Ginny said. There were small windows which provided a view of the solar panels, specifically so the astronauts could assure themselves they were intact and operational and moved which way and how far they told them to. There was a hole in one of the panels the size of a basketball.
Conn was mostly relieved that it wasn’t something life-threatening, but she knew it could turn out to be. “We’ll have to be extra careful when we aerobrake,” she told Carson City. They were just about to tell her the same thing, they said. Aerobraking was skimming the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere to slow down enough to maintain an orbit. Much of the surface area that would be doing the skimming was the solar panels. A hole in one of them might decrease the drag they were expecting from the maneuver, or, worse, could cause the spacecraft to tumble.
The hole wasn’t a threat to their power, thanks to redundancy. And the spacecraft hadn’t been twenty feet to starboard when the space rock hit, or they could have all been killed. For those reasons, it was business as usual.
It was during lunch, later in March, when they began their insertion into Venus orbit. Ginny was in charge of swiping the right screens and toggling the right switches to assist the computer as necessary: she was the pilot. Conn took a navigational reading out the window with a sextant. Ryan stood by, a bundle of nervous energy.
They had eddy-current braked for about three weeks, to ensure they were at the right speed going around Venus. But they came in hot to the Venusian gravity well. If Venus had been their destination, they would have come in much slower. They fell toward Venus, until after insertion when they curved around the hothouse planet in an elliptical arc. They were going too fast to achieve a stable orbit without substantial aerobraking, but they wanted to break out of Venus orbit before they had even completed one circuit anyhow. The original plan for two orbits was scrapped in the name of speed.
The maneuver went smoothly. Ginny burned the spacecraft’s engines, and it hurtled toward the red planet (or, where the red planet would be on July fourth) at a dizzying speed, faster than any humans had ever gone.
The spacecraft was officially called the Adventure, but the crew called it Marvin, after Looney Tunes’ Marvin the Martian, and also because when they gave voice commands it was like they were talking to the robot in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When the spacecraft talked back, it didn’t sound droll and sarcastic, like Hitchhiker’s’ Marvin, but they kept the name anyway.
It was not lost on the Adventure-rs that in the entire history of the exploration of the red planet, half of all missions to Mars had failed in some way, some catastrophically. Now there were two spacecraft en route. Would only one of them succeed? And what would happen to the other one, if so?
The only man to land on Mars, Cole Heist, was dead before his lander came to a halt. That happened sixteen years earlier. NASA, Roscosmos and Dyna-Tech had each launched robotic missions to the surface in the interim. Dyna-Tech’s attempt failed, and the Russian mission failed so utterly they didn’t even try again. Conn wished the Russian mission had succeeded: it was to be a full survey of the entire planet using Pelorian technology—the same tech the Pelorians used to survey the moon. She was grateful, at least, for the survey data of their landing site near the north pole, courtesy of the successful landing and operation of the NASA rover.
Conn had no doubt Dyna-Tech would land in the same general area that they would. The north pole had water ice, essential for any kind of permanent presence on the planet, so it was a logical place for a portal. Dyna-Tech had the same detailed survey data of the area that Conn did. The Russian survey vehicle would likely be found in the immediate vicinity, if Russia was paying Dyna-Tech to go find it. (They had tried to pay Marcus Stoll to make it happen on his mission, but he’d said no.) And, it was near where Cole Heist and his lander had ended up. The public and the pundits would not accept a mission to Mars that didn’t locate the wreckage and bury, or otherwise honor, Heist.
So, their putative landing site had seen Cole Heist, Dyna-Tech, and the Russian mission fail, and one NASA rover succeed. A much worse local success rate than fifty percent.
The so-called Mars Curse was on Ginny’s, Ryan’s, and Conn’s minds as they ripped around Venus and sped to the red planet. They knew they were going faster than was safe. They were cutting it so close that they were counting on a drag from Phobos, the twenty-two-kilometer-wide moon, to help brake them. If any mission to Mars was flouting the Mars Curse, it was theirs.
Three weeks before arrival at Mars, another incident, this one involving the humans inside the spacecraft. They were not using their engines, instead using electromagnetic induction to slow them as they approached Mars. But the engines would be critical to insertion and orbit, and they were tested regularly.
In one of these tests it came to light that one engine was “sputtering,” firing at as little as two-thirds capacity. Three weeks out from Mars was a lousy time for an engine to fail, though better to have the problem now than in three weeks.
Ryan had opened the maintenance panel, examined everything Carson City told him to examine, and could find no fault with the workings of the engine. By three weeks to arrival, Ryan was almost impossible to interact with, not only to the women aboard the spacecraft but to the operations people on Earth. Ryan accused ops of steering him away from whatever was broken in the engine because they would prefer that Conn or Ginny do it. Furious, he gave up trying to fix anything, and told one of the women to do it.
Conn had Ginny try next, so that Ginny could avoid Ryan. A set of wires had obviously come apart from one end of their connection. They helped operate the fuel regulators, feeding the engines the precise amount of fuel needed. Without them attached correctly, the engines could never vary from zero to full power or anything in-between, they would be stuck wherever they were. Ginny fixed the wires. They all hoped that that was the end of the issue with the engines. But the wires had so obviously been out of place that Ginny wondered how Ryan hadn’t seen it.
Everything was fine for a while, but the same issue arose with the same engine: a “sputtering,” dipping below full capacity at random intervals.
Conn took her turn at the maintenance panel. She had ops go through everything that had been looked at already, and then she looked with fresh eyes to see if she could spot the trouble. She did: a connector that held the end of a wire against its contact point was loose. Conn tightened it, and the issue went away.
Confronting Ryan, Conn learned that he had yanked the fuel regulator wires out in anger and frustration. Conn excused Ryan from even routine maintenance after that.
FOURTEEN
Phobos
July 3 - 5, 2039
Carson City was giving Conn constant updates on the Dyna-Tech mission. The spacecraft Peo Haskell (there was murder in Conn’s heart when she heard the name) inserted itself into the same orbit as the moon Phobos on July third. It took its time approaching and then landing on the moon, a precise and dangerous maneuver. It was accomplished by eleven PM Pacific time on the third. The Peo Haskell was too big to land on Mars and not powerful enough to lift back off anyway, but in an impressive feat of engineering prowess it was able to land on the pocked, rocky moon.
The astronauts aboard slept. At eight thirty AM Pacific on the fourth, all three, Scott Daniels, Izzy De Maria, and Sergei Dzagoev, emerged, and got to work installing two portals. One gate was to provide line-of-sight to a sister gate
at the Dyna-Tech space station, the second, line-of-sight to the proposed portal at the north pole of Mars. No one but Dyna-Tech knew until later, but it turned out that Dyna-Tech decided to use all three astronauts so they could be done quicker and beat Conn’s expedition to the surface. The original plan called for only two to do the work.
The crew worked quickly in personal pressure fields with O2 tanks on their backs rather than full-blown space suits. One portal assembled, the crew gingerly moved about three kilometers away—escape velocity off Phobos was a mere forty kilometers per hour—and began assembling the second. They would test the first portal after the other was finished. With a scant seven and a half-hour revolution, the moon would line up with the space station portal frequently, when it wasn’t on the wrong side of Mars, and the space station wasn’t on the wrong side of Earth.
Each portal when assembled was an arch three and two-thirds meters across and four meters high at its apex. There was no crackling energy field inside, nothing that would give away that it was a powerful, solar-powered machine. It just looked like an out-of-place arch.
The crew were assembling the second portal, Izzy De Maria atop a stepladder locking pieces together at the top, when a sleek, intimidating-looking spacecraft hurtled by, engines afire.
# # #
The Adventure accelerated as it approached Mars, there was nothing to be done about that. A month and a half of eddy current braking had slowed them enough to attempt their audacious plan. But they still had to slow much more, which entailed skimming the Martian atmosphere for drag, and taking advantage of gravity to rein them in around the red planet.
The spacecraft arced down toward the planet surface. It skimmed the upper atmosphere, counting on the drag to slow them, without either deflecting them off into deep space or burning them up. They had accounted for the hole in the solar panels, and they were in a proper, adjusted attitude. Ginny had gone out and measured the hole precisely, and after that, it was a matter of math.
Conn worried—about plunging to a fiery death, and about Ryan. Ryan’s anxiety was carved into his face, which looked like it might start crying at any moment. Conn told herself not to worry about Ginny. She trusted her pilot.
With good reason, it turned out: the maneuver worked as planned. It was time to buzz Phobos, less than ten thousand kilometers above the Martian surface.
The spacecraft rose as it approached the tiny moon. It reoriented and accelerated to raise and lengthen its orbit, and as it did so, the gravity of Mars as well as the meager gravity of the moon tugged at it, wanting to reel it back in.
Aboard the spacecraft, two astronauts’ knuckles were white as they experienced all this. Conn squirmed as she watched Ginny’s fingers sweep across a screen and then flick some switches and stab a button, reorienting and firing the engines (pointing in the “wrong” direction) to brake some more. Conn wished there was something she could do, but it was all the computer and Ginny. The sheen of sweat and look of intense concentration on Ginny betrayed how precise each maneuver had to be to keep them in orbit around Mars.
They left the meager gravitational influence of Phobos, and Ginny opened up the engines to full power, giving it everything the spacecraft had in an effort not to be slung off into the deeper space of the solar system. For almost two hours, the astronauts watched a screen that displayed a telemetry graph, each one willing it to come out in the right shape. As they approached what should be apogee of their extremely elliptical orbit, they held their breath.
If they broke out of their orbit, they would find themselves hurtling away, from both Mars and the history books. And that wasn’t the worst of it. They would continue at a blazing speed until they could brake enough to turn and come back. Nobody knew how long that would take, and whether the Adventure would keep them alive for however long it was. It might be a very long time, as they would also run out of fuel sooner than later, with the spacecraft currently near the end of its intended journey.
The astronauts let out their breath collectively when the spacecraft turned back toward Mars. They hadn’t broken away.
Another 105 minutes elapsed. At that time, Ginny cut the engine power down and the spacecraft sank again, on another approach to Phobos. It buzzed the moon a second time, giving the Dyna-Tech astronauts another flyby to admire, then duplicated its previous efforts. Again they felt the tug of both Martian and Phobos gravity, slowing them. Ginny spun the craft so the engines were in front again, and fired full power. Ryan got sick, and globs of vomit floated in the cabin until he took care of it.
After this second flyby of Phobos, the apogee of their orbit was closer in, their orbit less elliptical. On their next way around they didn’t have to bob down toward Phobos; they braked and tightened their orbit without the influence of the moon. Within eight hours, there was no more correction to be done, and the spacecraft was in a stable, sustainable orbit. An achievement that only twenty years earlier, using the physics and equipment of the time, would have taken substantially longer.
Carson City, Conn, and a miserable Ryan all applauded Ginny’s good work. Ginny was more exhausted than enthused.
Conn had kept the option open to send the lander down to the surface upon achieving a stable orbit, but Ginny was in no shape to do the precise steps that would be necessary for lander separation. Ryan wasn’t ready, either, and Conn worried that he might never be. But none of them were one hundred percent, after the tension and violence of their ordeal. They stuck to their schedule: they would get four hours’ sleep, then begin the process of separation and landing.
Operations reported that the Dyna-Tech expedition was still finishing up on the surface of Phobos. With all of them working all day, they would have to get some sleep as well before doing anything else. Conn figured they would need at least four hours, too. She hoped she was right.
Conn couldn’t sleep. She was excited about the upcoming landing, and concerned that Dyna-Tech would get to the surface before they did. She could have slept through that, though. She had made herself fall asleep on the moon, a destination she had dreamed of since childhood. She could make herself sleep through almost anything. Worry about Ryan kept her awake.
It wasn’t that he’d gotten sick, same as before liftoff at the Cape. Conn had come close to throwing up herself. Rather, he was unpredictable. He was about to make history, and Conn didn’t know how he would react. What would his frame of mind be? She hoped the gravity of his historical moment would make him behave himself, but she didn’t like the odds.
She had been concerned for some time. A week earlier she had confronted him with a suspicion that he wasn’t taking his pills for anxiety. He insisted he was, and retrieved the bottle and invited Conn to count the pills. When she said she didn’t need to count them, Ryan barked, “good!” and plunged back into his pod.
He could be pleasant for stretches of time, but Conn got the sense that it was an effort. Well, if it was, that was good news. Better he be making an effort than not.
Ryan’s contentious demeanor had an effect on Ginny, who by the time they reached Mars was stressed out most of the time they were all together. If Ryan hadn’t been taking his medication, Conn had half a mind to take it away from Ryan and give the pills to Ginny. Conn had ops send her Ginny’s journal entries. As she read them, Ginny seemed at most annoyed by Ryan—though, granted, there was a lot of that. Once or twice she wrote that she was at her wit’s end with him, but this seemed to Conn to be an exaggeration. Ginny by all the evidence was keeping it together enough for both her and Ryan. Conn was relieved and grateful to have Ginny on the expedition for reasons beyond her wonderful piloting.
As quietly as possible while Ginny and Ryan slept, Conn contacted Carson City and asked about the Dyna-Tech timetable for landing and whether the portal had worked. She felt a pang of anxiety herself: if the portals didn’t work, that would be bad news for her and her crew.
The Dyna-Tech crew had worked on the surface until one AM Pacific. They had sent an adjustable w
rench through the portal and it had appeared as planned at the space station, to raucous applause. The next time the gate was oriented toward the space station, attention would be on the landing. The time after that, at about four PM Pacific, Dyna-Tech planned to send a person through, from the space station to Phobos.
Dyna-Tech told the feeds that the crew would begin separation and landing at eight AM. As when they had said they would arrive in Mars orbit on July seventh, Conn was suspicious that they were telling the public—and her—one time while planning to do it much earlier.
Ginny and Ryan would be awakened at five AM Pacific, and separation would begin by six thirty. Conn told operations they had to accelerate that, and begin no later than six. She wouldn’t disturb their sleep, but they would eat quickly, and she and Ryan would be quicker about moving to the lander.
She was happy she had made that decision when the feeds reported that Dyna-Tech had moved separation up to six twenty Pacific.
FIFTEEN
To the Surface
July 5, 2039
By choosing a landing area near the north pole and orbiting near the equator, the logistics people had given Conn and Ryan a window to separate and descend every twenty-six minutes. Conn refused to wake Ginny or Ryan before five, as planned. They both needed sleep. She needed sleep, though she wasn’t getting it. But she and Ryan could eat breakfast during their descent. They moved up their separation to five thirty-five. Still less than an hour before Dyna-Tech.
It would be even closer than that: the Dyna-Tech spacecraft had lowered itself to four hundred kilometers away from the Martian surface. The Adventure’s orbit was much higher: 620 kilometers. Dyna-Tech would have a considerable head start.
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