by Neil Clarke
This was true. Steuby climbed up out of the sinkhole. “Come on, then,” he said.
“Where?”
“We can’t walk back to PM,” Steuby said. “Can’t drive. So we’re going to have to fly.”
“Fly what?”
Steuby didn’t want to tell her what he was thinking until he had a little more than moonshine to go on. “Let’s head to the garage over there. I’ll show you.”
They sealed the garage doors after they went inside. It was warm. Condensation appeared on their faceplates. “Hey,” Steuby said. “There’s still air in here.”
He popped his faceplate and smelled dirt and plants. A passive oxygen system in the garage circulated air from a nearby greenhouse. The plants hadn’t had time to freeze and die yet.
With the dirty faceplate off, he could see better in the dim interior. He found a light switch and flicked it on, just in case. “Hey, lights too.”
Now for the real test. Along one wall of the garage were a series of spigots and vents, spaced out over underground tanks. Steuby walked along them, saying silent prayers to the gods of chemistry that one of the spigots would be tagged with a particular series of letters.
He stopped at the fourth and pointed out the letters. “MMH,” Bridget read. “Monomethylhydrazine, right?”
“Yup,” Steuby said. “Also known as jackpot. They must have made it down here for impulse thrusters. Landers would need to tank up on it before they took off again. You know what this means?”
“That we have a whole lot of a fuel that doesn’t work in our ship, which is crashed anyway.”
“No, it means we have half of a hypergolic fuel combination designed to work in engines just exactly like the one built into that rocket out there.” Steuby pointed toward the garage’s bank of south-facing windows. Bridget followed the direction of his finger.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “That thing is a toy.”
“Au contraire, Mademoiselle,” Steuby said. “I’ve seen those fly.”
When he’d gotten out of the construction business after Walter Navarro’s death and spent his next years fleecing tourists, Steuby had briefly worked on an amusement park project. A woman named Veronica Liu wanted to create an homage to classic visions of the Moon from the days before the Space Age. Lots of pointy rockets and gleaming domes. She’d built it over the course of a year, with rides specifically designed for the Moon’s gravity, and then at the opening ceremony she had put on a big show of landing a fleet of rockets specifically designed to recall the covers of pulp magazines from the 1940s. They were pointy, finned, gleaming—and when the amusement park went under five years after Liu built it, they were sold off to other concerns. One of them was still on the Moon as far as Steuby knew, because she hadn’t been able to sell it for a price that made the deal worth doing.
Another was now standing on a small pad a kilometer from the garage. Steuby had spotted it on their first flyover. He didn’t know how it had gotten there, and he didn’t care. All he cared about was finding out whether it would fly.
“That’s a ridiculous idea. This whole thing was a ridiculous idea. You had to come up with a stupid scheme to get rich and now Marco’s dead because you couldn’t just get off Mars like everyone else.” Bridget was working herself up into a full-on rage. Steuby thought he should do something about it but he didn’t know what. His way of dealing with trauma was to pretend he wasn’t dealing with it. Hers was apparently to blow off some steam a short time after the traumatic event. “You wanted to come see HB and loot the mysteries! You said we’d be out and back in no time flat, no problem! Now we’re going to die because of what you said!”
This was the wrong time to remind her that the whole thing had been Marco’s plan, Steuby thought. He wasn’t good at dealing with people, or emotions, but since Bridget was the one with the expertise in battery systems and flight control, he needed her help. Maybe a useful task would help her cope and also keep them alive.
“Let’s find out if it’s ridiculous,” he said. “Come with me and we’ll do a preflight check.” He dropped his faceplate and went to the door.
After a pause, she said, “Why not. If we’re going to die anyway.”
Bridget didn’t really believe him, but given no other option she went along while Steuby climbed up the ladder and poked around in the rocket. From the hiss when he opened the access door he could tell it had been sealed against the Martian dust—as much as anything could be sealed against Martian dust.
She looked at clusters of cables and wires, followed connections, popped open recessed coves in the floor, and eventually said, “We’re still going to die, but electronically all of this looks intact.”
“Perfect,” Steuby said.
“For certain values of perfect,” Bridget said. They climbed back down and Steuby checked the thruster assembly, feeling a surge of optimism as he opened panel after panel and found that the rocket had been staged and left. Nobody had stripped it for parts. Probably they’d looked at it and—like Bridget—thought it was just a toy.
But Steuby knew better. All this rocket needed was juice in its batteries to run the control systems, and fuel in its tanks to fire the engine.
“You watch,” he said. “We’re going to get out of here yet.”
Bridget regarded the rocket with open scorn. “If by out of here you mean out of our bodies into the afterlife, I completely agree.”
“I will be willing to accept your apology when we reach orbit,” Steuby said. “Come on. We need charged batteries and a few tons of dinitrogen tetroxide.” He headed for the garage, and she went with him.
They had ammonia, all they wanted, held in another of the underground tanks. It was useful enough that the base had kept a supply. Steuby was willing to bet that one of the machines in the garage either was designed to oxidate ammonia or could be configured to do so. NTO was a standard liquid fuel for all kinds of rocket models. All they had to do was find the right machine.
“We used to do this on the Moon,” Steuby said. “You mix the ammonia with regular old air, and as nitrogen oxides form you add nitric acid to catalyze more nitrogen oxides. After that, you cool the mixture down and compress it, and the oxides combine to make NTO. It’s just shuffling atoms around. Doesn’t even need heat. All you need is compression at the right time and a way to siphon off the NTO. I would bet Marco’s last dollar there’s an NTO synthesizer somewhere around here.”
They went looking for it and found it within ten minutes. There was even a generator, and the generator even still had power left in its fuel cells. For the first time since Marco’s death, Steuby started to recover his natural state of irrational optimism.
They ran a hose from the ammonia tank over to the synthesizer, fed it a fair bit, and fired it up. Then they wheeled over a smaller tank of nitric acid and pumped some of it in, Steuby doing the figures in his head. They didn’t have to be exact. The reaction, once it got going, just needed continual adjustment of ammonia, air, and nitric acid at the right pressures, and the holding tank on the other end of the synthesizer would fill up with nasty, corrosive, carcinogenic, and in this case life-saving NTO.
The synthesizer rattled to life. Steuby waited for it to explode or fall apart, but it didn’t. It appeared to work. He watched the capacity readout on the tank. It stayed at 00 for a very long time . . . and then it ticked over to 01. Bridget looked on, and the readout ticked to 02 . . . 03. ... “Keep this up and I’ll start to believe you know what you’re doing.”
“Love it,” Steuby said. “This is my favorite machine. Now all we need to do is make sure we can fuel up and take off before the storm gets bad and keep the rocket going straight up and escape the gravity well and make the rendezvous and convince the freighter to slow down and take us on board.”
“When you put it like that,” Bridget said.
Steuby nodded. “Now let’s charge the batteries.”
The sun was all the way up by the time they found the solar array’s char
ging transfer board and ran cables all the way out to the rocket. Possibly it would have been quicker to pull the batteries and bring them to the charging station, but Steuby was nervous about disturbing anything on the rocket. There were charging ports built into the battery housing, and there was enough power cable lying around to reach Jupiter, so that was the most straightforward way. Still, it took a few hours, and both Bridget and Steuby stood around nervously watching the battery-charging readouts as the morning sky passed through its spooky blue dawn into its normal brownish-yellow.
“Good thing about solar arrays is they’re pretty low maintenance,” he said, to pass the time.
The charging indicators on the batteries lit up.
“Wonder how the NTO synthesizer is doing,” Bridget said. She looked up at the sky. They knew what time it was, but that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the position of Phobos, zipping around three times a day. They were practically in Apollo 13 territory. The plan was this: watch until Phobos was in more or less the right place, then touch off the rocket’s engines, and if they’d avoided fatal errors they would launch, achieve orbit, and then run out of fuel about when the freighter came along. The freighter’s schedule was always the same: wait until the moons passed by, dock with the elevator, split before the moons passed by again. Once the freighter had decoupled from the elevator terminus, it would fire an escape burn. It took two hours or so to prep that burn. Bridget knew this because she had worked the Belt before deciding she liked to experience gravity once in a while. Even Martian gravity.
In this case the freighter wouldn’t be doing a drop. Instead it would be taking on people and supplies, but the time frame was more or less the same. Counting two hours in Phobos’ orbit from when it passed the elevator terminus put the little Number Nine Moon right on the western horizon. They had about an hour from then to fire their rocket, so they could be at escape velocity when they got close to the freighter, which would probably make an emergency burn to save them, but maybe not. Everything would be much more certain if they could match the freighter’s velocity as closely as possible, which meant putting the rocket in a trans-Earth trajectory.
Problem was, if they did that and the freighter didn’t pick them up, they would die long before they got to Earth. The rocket, if it had any fuel left, would do an automated Earth-orbit injection burn and the Orbital Enforcement Patrol would board it to find their desiccated bodies. Steuby hoped he wouldn’t die doing something embarrassing.
Actually, he hoped he wouldn’t die at all. You had to remind yourself of that once in a while when you were in the middle of doing something that would probably kill you. You got so used to the idea that you were going to die, you started trying to make the best of it. It was a useful corrective to articulate the possibility that you might survive.
The day on Mars was forty minutes longer than the day on Earth. Phobos went around about every eight hours, rising in the west because it orbited so much faster than Mars rotated. They needed to get the rocket up to a little more than five kilometers per second for escape velocity. Steuby liked the way those numbers went together. Forty, eight, five. Factors. Of course they had nothing to do with each other, but given the chaos of recent events, Steuby was willing to take his symmetry where he could find it.
Waiting for the tank to fill again, he looked around at the abandoned settlement. HB seemed nice, more like a real place to live than just a colony outpost. There was even public art, a waist-high Mount Rushmore of Martian visionaries carved from reddish stone. Wells, Bradbury, Robinson, Zhao. Marco probably would have wanted to take it if he was still alive, and if they could have justified the weight.
“No can do,” he said out loud. “We’re fighting the math. Man, Marco, when I was a kid, you could get anything. Strawberries in January. We were on our way. Now we’re on our way back. Pulling back into our shell.”
“Stop talking to him,” Bridget said. “He’s dead.”
“Look.” He was crying and hoped it didn’t show in his voice. His helmet was so dusty she wouldn’t be able to see.
Then she wiped the dust away with her gloved hand and said, “Steuby. I get it. He was an old friend and you’re sad. Stop being an ass about it and stop trying to pretend you’re not doing it, because if you divide your attention you’re going to make a mistake and it will kill us. Okay?”
“Right,” he said. “Okay.”
He kept an eye on the NTO tank while Bridget did something to the monitors on the solar array, but he kept thinking: I’m millions of miles from Earth waiting for a robot left over from a failed Mars colony to finish refueling my rocket and hoping a dust storm doesn’t stop us from making a semi-legal rendezvous with a freighter coming back from the asteroid belt. How had he gotten into this situation?
Steuby was sixty-two years old, born in 2010, and had only ever seen one other person die in front of him. That was back on the Moon, where he’d worked for almost fifteen years. A guy named Walter Navarro, looking the wrong way when someone swung a steel beam around at a construction site. The end of the beam smashed the faceplate of Walter’s helmet. The thing Steuby remembered most about it was the way Walter’s screams turned into ice fog pouring out and drifting down onto the regolith. By the time they got him inside he was dead, with frozen blood in his eyes from where the shards of the faceplate had cut him. Steuby had gotten out of the construction business as soon as he’d collected his next paycheck. After that he’d run tourist excursions, and seen some weird shit, but nothing weirder than Walter Navarro’s dying breaths making him sparkle in the vacuum.
They found a tractor that would run and hooked the tank carriage to it. The tractor’s engine whined at the load, but it pulled the tank as long as they kept it in low gear. The rocket’s fueling port was high on its flank, on the opposite side from the gantry that reached up to the passenger capsule in the nose. Ordinarily a crew would refuel it with a cherry-picker truck, but neither Steuby nor Bridget could find that particular vehicle in or near the garage and they didn’t have time to look anywhere else. So they had to tie two ladders together and lean them against the rocket. They flipped a coin to see who would climb, and Bridget lost. Steuby watched her go. “Hey, if you break your leg you’re gonna have a hell of a time getting in the rocket,” he said.
Bridget didn’t miss a beat. “Better shoot me and leave me, then. Like Marco.”
For some reason her tone of voice made Steuby think she was trying to make him feel bad.
“I didn’t shoot Marco,” he said defensively, even though he wasn’t sure what he was defending.
Once the nitrogen tetroxide was topped off, they had to go back and clean the tank out, then fill it with hydrazine. Together the compounds would fuel a rocket via a hypergolic reaction. One of Steuby’s favorite words, hypergolic. Like just being golic wasn’t enough. Neither chemical would do a thing by itself—well, other than poison and corrode anything they touched. Together, boom.
Usually transfers like this were done in clean rooms, by techs in clean suits. Steuby and Bridget were doing it in a dust-filled garage wearing worn-out spacesuits that probably had a dozen microscopic leaks each. He hoped they wouldn’t have to do any maneuvering in hard vacuum anytime soon.
When they cranked the fresh hose onto the nipple and locked it into place, Bridget and Steuby looked at each other. “Just so we’re clear,” Steuby said, “this will blow up and kill us both if there’s any trace of the tetro still in there.”
“Yup,” Bridget said.
“Okay then.” Steuby paused over the dial that would open the synthesizer and start dumping the MMH into the tank. “I’ll try not to talk to Marco anymore,” he said.
“That’s the least of my worries right now.”
“It’s just . . . this is going to sound weird, but I talk to him even though he’s dead because if I talk to him, it’s like he’s not dead, which makes me think I might not die.”
“Turn the knob, Steuby,” she said.
&
nbsp; “I don’t want to die.”
She put her gloved hand over his, which was still resting on the dial. “I know. Me neither. But let’s be honest. If we really wanted to be one hundred percent sure of living, we wouldn’t be on Mars.”
This was true. Bridget started to move Steuby’s hand. The dial turned. Monomethylhydrazine started dumping into the tank. It did not explode.
Riding another spike of optimism, Steuby ran to the door. Phobos was visible. They had about eight hours to get the hydrazine topped off and transferred, and then get themselves aboard the rocket. He checked the batteries. They were still pretty low.
“How much of a charge do we need?” Bridget asked.
“I have no idea,” Steuby said. “A few hours at least. It won’t take long to reach orbit, but once we’re out there we’d better be able to get the freighter’s attention and keep pinging them our position until they can get to us.”
“Assuming they want to get to us.”
“They will. The whole point of the Lift is to evacuate people, right? We’re people. We need evacuation.”
Bridget spent some time in the rocket’s crew capsule testing the electronics, which were in fine shape and included an emergency beacon on a frequency that was still standard. “Should we just set it off?” Steuby wondered. Bridget was against it on the grounds that nobody could get all the way across the planet to them and still make the last ship out, whereas if they sent an SOS from near-Mars space, a rendezvous would be easier. Steuby didn’t want to go along with this, but he had to admit it made sense.
Other than that, most of the work they had to do—filling tanks, keeping the solar array focused, monitoring the mix in the synthesizer—was in the shop, away from the omnipresent Martian dust. Most of it, anyway. Humankind had not yet invented the thing capable of keeping Mars dust completely out of an enclosed space. Even so, they couldn’t do everything inside. Bridget found some kind of problem with one of the battery terminals in the rocket, and they had to go out and pop the cover to see what was wrong. While she worked on it, Steuby watched the horizon.