Musa searched for a hole on the opposite side. “Here, I have it. It looks like the self-sealant handled the exit wound.” He ran his fingers over the automatic patch. “Still, once you finish up there, better give this one an extra layer.”
Pop! Pop, ping! The craft was hit again. This time, the ship went dark. A dozen battery-operated lights activated, and a soft, unnerving hiss filled Dylan’s ears. “We got us another leak or two.” This dang emergency lighting’s hardly fit to find a horse in his stable. We’re losing oxygen by the second. “We gotta get this under control. Right now.”
Ping-ping!
Musa screamed an agonizing cry of pain. Large beads of blood swirled where the fingers of his left hand had been.
“Musa!” Dylan said. He pushed toward the injured astronaut and tried to control the bleeding, but the pressure suit impeded his efforts. “Shit.” He pulled his gloves off and removed what remained of Musa’s left glove. There were four bleeding stumps where Musa’s fingers should be.
“Heads up!” Ian said. He pushed a medi-kit toward Dylan.
Dylan grabbed the kit and stuck it to his pressure suit. He pulled it open, found a large gauze bandage, and pressed it onto Musa’s hand.
Musa bit his teeth and tried to suppress a scream. He failed.
Dylan found an over-sized, syringe-like tool in the kit. He used it to apply a dusty lair of nanoparticles onto the damaged flesh. The bleeding stopped. He turned his head left and right, listening to the whooshing of atmosphere escaping into the vacuum of space. “Hold tight, Musa. I’ll be back for you soon as we stop the ship from bleeding out.” His eyes focused on the port wall. There you are. He pushed off with a flick of his heels and drifted across the cabin. He reached the other side and placed his hand over the hole. The hissing stopped. “Ian, get over here and patch this up before I get a hickey on my hand. Chad, look around. There’s at least one more leak.” He had just spoken the words when the shhhhhhh sound ended with ptttth. Silence. “The self-sealant seemed to have done its job,” Dylan said. He spoke calmly, though his heart still pounded in his ears. “Ian, grab an ultrasonic sensor. Check for micro-leaks the self-sealant might have missed. Chad, get to surveying the ship for damage.” He pushed back to Musa then searched the medi-kit for a small hypodermic then injected Musa with a powerful synthetic pain killer. “Let’s get you taken care of, my friend.”
Ian and Chad checked on Musa then set to work assessing their fragile vessel.
After a few minutes, Ian reported back. His face was pale, his eyes wide open. “Guys, it’s bad. We lost the lateral water tank. A meteor must have ripped through all the bladders. It’s completely empty. The dorsal tank was hit too, but we only lost fifteen percent there. The ion drive took a couple of strikes, but it doesn’t look like anything vital was hit. It’s still running and reading normal operation.”
“Do we still have enough water to make the trip?” Chad, too, was pale, but his eyes were focused, and his words were crisp.
“No,” Ian said. “Even if we could conserve enough water, which I doubt, our waste is a key component of our radiation shielding. If we don’t drink enough, we won’t excrete enough to fill the shield wall. Missing that part of the shielding wouldn’t kill us outright, but the radiation would sicken us during the mission and cut our life expectancy by a few years.”
“Understood,” Dylan said. “Ian, update NASA on our situation. Ask them to run the water and radiation numbers for the scenario that we continue. Tell them the primary antenna will be offline for a bit. I want you to redirect it toward Mars. I need to make a call.”
Moments later, Dylan sat alone on the command deck. The image of Juliana Cotto, commander of Mars Station, appeared on his monitor. “Commander Lockwood. This is an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?”
“Commander Cotto, we’re in a bit if a pickle here. First, I have to ask, are you alone there?” Dylan waited the four minutes his message took to reach Mars, and the four minutes for a reply to return.
“I’m alone. And I take it, you’re not on Earth.” Juliana smiled. “In case you’re wondering how I know that, your last message reached me too fast to have originated from home.”
“I still can’t get anything past you, Commander,” Dylan said with a warm grin. “The truth is, we’re on a classified deep space mission, and we got hit real bad by a meteoroid cluster. The mission is jeopardized. I can’t tell you anything about our objective, except that it’s damn important. Important enough that I’ll shorten my crew’s life by years if need be to complete it. I hope we can swing by for some repairs and to borrow an eight-month supply of water for a crew of four. Juliana, here’s the big ask. To slow into Mars orbit and get back on track afterward, we need to borrow a little over two hundred tons of liquid Xenon for the ion thrusters. I want to make sure you can spare that much before I run the plan by NASA.”
Juliana’s reply came eight minutes later. “Swing by? Mars? Hold on while I run this by ops. I won’t tell them about you. I’ll tell them to run the numbers as a disaster planning exercise.” The clock ticked by. Four minutes, eight minutes, fourteen minutes. Her video resumed. “We can do it, Dylan. We’ll need to reschedule several asteroid exploration missions. Our friendly neighborhood Sankos rep will be peeved about the delays, but I guess we can be resupplied long before you can. Transmit your navigation details. We have an asset in a fortuitous position. It might let you come in hot and save some time on your trip.”
Dylan leaned into the camera. “Thank you, Juliana. I’ll phone up Houston and suggest we head over for a visit.”
He didn’t wait the minutes it would take for her reply, traveling at the speed of light, to reach him. Instead, he drifted out to the common area. Ian and Chad were running through checklists for every system on the ship. Musa was installing more permanent patches over the emergency self-seals.
“Musa, let us handle that. You get some rest,” Dylan said.
“I’m good, commander,” Musa said. “The nanoderm sealed the wound up tight.”
Dylan nodded. He watched the men, his crew, work for a moment before announcing the plan. “Ian, set course for Mars Station. Commander Cotto says they can spare enough supplies for us to complete our mission.”
Musa looked up from an oxygen scrubber he was inspecting. “If we’re going to Mars anyhow, can’t we pick up the Chinese crew first? I know it’s been almost a week, but maybe…”
“I don’t know,” Ian said. “Our engines have been burning the whole time. We’re moving faster now. The original rescue plan was to match velocity and cut our thrust days ago. I can run the numbers.”
“I already did,” Dylan said, “while I was awaiting the reply from Mars Station. Even if we burn the engines at one hundred ten percent, we wouldn’t get back to the Kuànggōng in time to make a difference. We would be beyond the three-week window the Chinese claim their life support will last and too close to when the second Chinese ship is likely to show up. If we head straight to Mars for repairs, we just might beat that other ship to Jupiter.”
“They might have found a way to hold out longer than three weeks,” Musa said. “Won’t you at least run it by NASA?”
Dylan’s eyes threatened to water up again. “I’m sorry. I truly am. We have our orders. We’re not going back.”
Safe Shores
“I have them on lidar,” Ian said.
“This’ll make a great chapter for your book about our mission.” Chad grinned and poked Ian with an elbow.
The ship’s telescope centered on two robotic tugs following an intercept trajectory. They happened to be en route from their assembly dock in low Earth orbit to Mars Station where they would serve to harvest asteroids. The unmanned ships carried twice the propellant necessary for a transfer orbit, with the balance destined to resupply the station. That enabled them to redirect and intercept the Jupiter Express and would allow them to fire their engines continuously, at maximum thrust, from the rendezvous point to Mars.
/> “Cut engines,” Dylan said. They were pointed away from Mars, their ion drive running constantly to slow them for orbital insertion. Their own thrust would not suffice. Without help, they would fly past Mars. He and Chad donned pressure suits as the tugs drew near, approaching from the direction of the red planet.
“I feel useless,” Musa said, clutching his mangled left hand.
Chad put an arm over Musa’s shoulder. “I’m your hands today. You guide me through it. You’re far from useless.”
Dylan picked up a two-meter-tall, hemispherical structure composed of an odd mash-up of thin tubes interconnected at unusual angles. It looked like several geo-domes, like the playground climbing structure, stacked inside each other. “You’re sure this thing will work?”
“It’ll work,” Chad said. “The AI optimizes in ways the human brain can’t. I’m confident in the design.”
“All right,” Dylan said, one eyebrow raised. He carried the structure out the airlock.
Chad took the other hemisphere as soon as the printer finished constructing it and followed Dylan out.
Dylan moved to the top of the Jupiter Express, just behind the main thruster. He anchored two of the object’s ten corners to the hull then moved under the dome, grabbed a red, six-inch-long bar at the apex of the hemisphere, and gave a burst from his suit’s get-around. The dome unfolded into a new structure more than twice as tall, whose feet contoured to the shape of the Jupiter Express. A downward blast returned Dylan to his ship, magnetic boots clacking onto the surface. He set to work attaching the remaining feet.
“I’m done over here,” Chad radioed. His structure was set up on the opposite side of their ship.
“Roger,” Dylan said. “I’ll be finished here in sixty seconds.”
The first drone ship became visible to the naked eye, illuminated by floodlights the astronauts set up to monitor the docking procedure. Plumes of thruster exhaust puffed from its nose.
Ian’s voice sounded over the radio. “The first tug is one hundred meters out. Are you coming back in?”
“This procedure has never been tried before,” Dylan said. “I’m going to stay out here and observe. Chad, you head back inside.”
“Roger,” Chad said. “I’ll wait in the airlock in case you need me.”
Dylan moved to the Jupiter Express’ starboard side.
The forty-meter-long tug inched forward. It was wider at the back to accommodate five low-power, high-efficiency ion drives. The nose, never intended to fly through an atmosphere, was bulbous. Ten meters. The nose took on clearer form. The lump resolved into a mass of tentacle-like arms, wrapped over each other like a space-going squid covering its eyes. Five meters. The arms unfolded, writhed, searched. Jets of gas shot upward from the nose, nudging the inbound ship toward the docking connector. It was coming in too far starboard. Another blast. An over-correction. A burst in the other direction. It overshot the mark again. A burst from the four forward-facing RCS nozzles brought the ship to a dead stop.
“We’ve got a glitch in the docking software. I think it’s because of the excess fuel it wouldn’t carry on an asteroid mission,” Ian said. “Give me two minutes, I’ll update a few parameters.”
“Understood,” Dylan said. “But don’t fire the RCS again before you clear it with me.”
“Roger,” Ian said.
Dylan shuffled ten meters to the mechanical cephalopod, magnetic boots latching and unlatching in response to his muscle movement. He climbed the hemispherical scaffold. Just like playing king of the hill, except in space. “Invert polarity of the right boot,” he told the suit’s control unit. Dylan wrapped his feet around the highest bar and touched his soles together. “Full power to the boots,” he said. His feet locked firmly together then he reached up, grabbed the tip of a tentacle with both hands, and pulled himself into a squat. Powered joints in the suit multiplied his strength. The ship’s nose drifted centimeter by centimeter toward the docking connector. Dylan let go the tentacle, disengaged his boots, and climbed down.
The tug came within grasping distance of the docking connector. Tentacles lashed out, wrapped around the thin, super-strong bars of the connector, and pulled the drone ship into place.
“We have contact,” Dylan said.
“I’m glad you didn’t get sandwiched in there somewhere,” Ian said. “My software changes are ready. The second tug is one hundred meters out.” Ian’s corrections worked. The second ship docked without incident.
Dylan and Chad returned from their spacewalk.
“Calculations complete and laid in,” Ian said. He and Dylan moved to the command deck and strapped in. The others secured themselves in the crew area.
“Let’s do it.” Dylan’s gaze fixed on a viewscreen showing the two tugs extending thirty meters past their tail.
Ian powered their own ion drive. “Twenty percent, dock holding.” He studied holographic readouts. “Tug drives engaged, twenty percent. Looking good.” Ian gradually increased the power of all engines. “One hundred percent output across the board. Structural integrity sensors green. Recalculating orbital insertion trajectory.” Their path to Mars appeared in front of them, the red planet represented by an apple-sized sphere of light. “The computer calculated the engines should burn at eighty-eight percent power. Five days to Mars.”
“We have no right to succeed,” Dylan said. “Look at us. Our ship was designed and assembled on an unrealistic schedule. Now we have a pair of tugs strapped to our nose. If anything fails, anything at all, we’ll fly right on past Mars into deep space, never to be seen again.”
“I always considered you an optimist,” Ian said.
“That’s the scary thing, Ian. I am.”
#
“Fifty meters,” Ian announced. The Jupiter Express floated three hundred kilometers over the copper-brown planetscape of Mars. Olympus Mons was visible from orbit, a towering mountain nearly three times taller than Earth’s Mount Everest and covering an area almost as large as France. The Martian atmosphere formed a thin, dark-blue line over the horizon, the spectacular color heralding sunrise. Mars Station, mankind’s largest off-world engineering accomplishment, loomed ahead. It consisted of an outer laboratory ring two hundred fifty meters across and an inner habitation ring joined to a central spine. Cargo bays connected to the top and bottom of the spine. Large solar collectors attached to a ring just below the bays, turning to face the sun as the station orbited Mars. The spine was capped with printers on either end that extended the station as additional material became available.
“Look there.” Ian pointed to a hair-thin contrail descending through the atmosphere from a point under the station. “Automated resupply rocket. They’re gathering material from the surface to replace the water and oxygen we requested.”
“What about the Xenon?” Musa asked.
“That has to come from home,” Ian said. “Mars has about the same ratio of atmospheric Xenon as Earth but the air’s much thinner. We can’t extract it fast enough with available technology.”
The ship inched toward a docking port near the top of the spine. Ian counted down the distance. “Ten meters. Five. Three, two, one.” Metallic clicks and mechanical whirs reverberated through the command deck. “We have positive docking. Initiating vestibule leak check.” The crew waited thirty minutes to ensure the seal with Mars Station was tight. Even a slow leak would deprive the humans drifting high over Mars of precious oxygen.
The check complete, the crew removed their helmets and moved toward the airlock. Dylan drifted through the eighty-centimeter hatch. “What the…?” The docking tunnel lights flashed on and off in irregular spurts. A bizarre hum echoed from somewhere far away, and a pungent, musty odor assaulted his nostrils. “Something’s not right here.” He nudged forward with his get-around. “Helmets back on. Musa, you’re with me. Ian, Chad. Stay on board.”
“What’s happening?” Chad called from inside the Jupiter Express.
“I’m not quite sure. It might be an electri
cal problem. There’s nobody here, and the lights are going haywire. Do you smell that? It’s like a moldy skunk stuck in a bug zapper.” Dylan locked his helmet in place and moved forward with Musa close behind. The docking tunnel went dark. Lights flickered irregularly through a small window in the next hatch five meters ahead. He eased it open and poked one eye past the edge. The hatch connected to the station’s spine, a tunnel about which the station rotated. As the two moved through, a high-pitched, horrific whine screeched from somewhere down the passage. That sounds worse than a stuck pig. Dylan’s breathing quickened. “That… that sound came from over there, that branch to the right, didn’t it?” Dylan pointed to an intersecting tunnel leading radially out from the spine.
Musa swallowed hard. His answer was a barely-audible hissing sound. “Yep.”
“No use hanging around here. Let’s go see what’s happening.” Dylan crept up the spine and along the radial tunnel. Lights still flashed at random intervals. Musa followed close behind, one hand firmly grasping Dylan’s shoulder. After twenty meters, a side tunnel, lit only by an occasional flash of light, led to a storage module. The pair rounded the corner.
“What the-” Dylan shouted.
A bulbous, alien head peered back at them.
Spikes projected from its chin.
Jaws lined with razor-sharp fangs chomped rhythmically.
Bags of skin expanded and contracted to the cadence of its breath.
That blood-curdling screech blasted from its mouth.
Dylan shielded Musa as the two turned to retreat. The lights came on, bright and steady. The sound of laughter, human laughter, echoed through the tunnel. Dylan looked back toward the alien creature. He saw a tall, balding man, a human, removing an alien costume from his upper body. The station’s crew drifted out from behind cargo crates. The alien-turned-human let the costume drift next to him and pushed forward. He extended a hand. “Davis Dawson, Executive Officer. Welcome to Mars Station.”
Dylan, then Musa, shook his hand with a tentative grip.
The Gods We Make Page 19