by Angel Wedge
Copyright ©2018 Angel Wedge
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, duplicated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means except by permission of the author.
The right of Angel Wedge to be identified as the author of this work is asserted by him in accordance with the 1988 Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act.
All characters in this book are entirely fictitious, and any similarity to real Martians is entirely coincidental.
* * *
Cover image futuristic astronaut without a helmet in rays of another sun by Ulia Koltyrina.
Title fonts Nikodecs and Resamitz, by Gluk.
The Unknown
Pilot
Day 0
Day 6
Day 15
Ambassador
Day 15
Negotiator
Day 16
Day 23
Day 24
Explorer
Day 25
Day 38
Day 42
Leader
Day 46
Pilot
It was a marvel. Not a marvel of science, all of the technology had been around for quite a few years now. But a triumph of the human spirit, the will to explore, and the willingness of a few people to put their desire to learn about the universe ahead of any kind of rivalry, or desire for personal fame. We’d had the technology for half a century, if not more, but it took that long for the experts in management, logistics, public relations, and finance to work their magic and make the mission possible.
The whole ship shook and rattled under the influence of tremendous forces. To all the people watching on television, it seemed like it should be creaking and groaning more than a galleon in a gale, and the engines should be roaring like the rage of a dragon. But of course it didn’t make a sound, because the engines were at full blast fighting the landing module’s terrible momentum long before they made contact with the upper atmosphere. So the engines’ roar and screaming struts overlaid onto the public broadcasts were taken from microphones in different parts of the module, or maybe even reproduced in an Earthside studio.
Commander Lemuel was staring up into the screens, watching the descent like a spectator on Earth might. He had the view from the onboard cameras as well, and a whole range of status displays to reassure him that everything was going well. But the autopilots could handle that, and there were three men ready to take over in an emergency if anything went wrong. The mission commander’s duty was to watch the screens, to smile for the cameras, and to wish that whoever designed their acceleration couches had given a little more thought to comfort. It felt like the straps were about to cut his arms off, or tighten to snap his body in two. He knew it was all in his mind, that the descent was perfectly safe, but that didn’t stop all his nerves screaming in discomfort as his body was subjected to forces many times what it was ever designed to survive. His nervous system didn’t know about all the technology that was going into cushioning and spreading out those forces, it just knew that this was painful.
He had to keep a brave face, though. He had to look good on the news broadcasts, and he had no doubt they would be watching him most of the way. They’d be watching the landing module too, from a dozen satellite cameras that were now falling alongside them into the upper atmosphere. So different from the moon landings, when the only viewpoint you had was aboard the ship. Cheap, disposable cameras could be made the size of a pinhead now, even including a short range transmitter. So you fired a thousand in a cloud around the ship, recorded all their transmissions, and then gave all the good ones to the news agencies along with the cabin footage; let them put together whatever montage they wanted.
As the outside of the ship heated up in the atmosphere, the other videos winked out one by one. Now, the only footage Commander Lemuel had to watch was of the members of his crew, the glowing white screens from the onboard cameras, and the radar map of the Martian surface below.
By the time they were out of the upper-atmospheric turbulence, the whole room was shaking so much that it was impossible to make out the faces of the others on the screens. No doubt they were being jostled and shaken just as much, and their expressions likely showed the same pain the Commander was feeling, with varying degrees of restraint as they attempted not to let it show.
Then they were in atmospheric flight, and the shaking from the main engines started to calm down. Along both sides of the craft, the heat shield panels were flaking away like really bad dandruff, and a pair of triangular wings extended from beneath, guiding them down in a roughly horizontal path. The pilots had all spent most of the last five years repeating this landing over and over in simulators, initially back at base, and more recently during the journey.
It was an entirely new system. The automated missions to Mars, before any of the current crew had been born, had relied on simple and robust technologies, like a capsule with inflatable padding that could roll and then break apart to release a launch vehicle. That wouldn’t work for people, though. For years, the businessmen who had managed to fund such an incredible venture had talked about a rocket capable of landing, using its main engines to slow down as it descended and then land perfectly upright. That wouldn’t work for such a large ship. But the technical and engineering challenges were ones that every scientist wanted to solve; they were the easy problems.
The big problem, for both the scientists and the economists, was that the journey would take years. And human beings weren’t designed to be alone for that long. Especially once you included the amount of research that would need doing in order to justify the mission, and then the return journey when they were finished. Phenomena like cabin fever were too much of a risk. So they ran the experiments, keeping people in sealed bunkers deep underground, and attempted to calculate just how long an average person could be cut off from communication with most of the world before there was an unacceptable risk of deviant behaviour. And they measured how many people they would need to put in a group before they were diverse enough to absorb any difference of opinions, and act as a functional society even when messages to the outside world were delayed, or intermittent.
Now they had a ship that couldn’t land vertically, because it was simply too large. It had been flown up from Earth in seven parts, assembled in orbit ready for the journey, and then yet more automated self-landing rockets made the journey to fill it with all the supplies it would need. It would fly to Mars, and the landing module would jettison all the parts that it had only needed to get it there, leaving a ship that was smaller and sleeker. It was still somewhat larger than a commercial jetliner, and just about aerodynamic enough, once the wings extended, to navigate its way down to the ground. It wasn’t intended to make a return trip.
In fact, the next ship to join them couldn’t make a return journey either. It would take four teams, and four out of the five landing modules, before they had enough parts between them to send any part of the titanic fleet back. A smaller return mission, allowing for the possibility that a small fraction of the crews might not be able to take the psychological or physiological stresses of a new planet. This wasn’t an exploration voyage now, this was a colony ship, because that was the only way it could be done.
The screens had stopped shaking. Commander Lemuel looked up at the images of his senior crew, and offered a thumbs-up gesture to Doctor Hallaran. She was looking a little nervous, as if she wasn’t sure what came next. Or maybe that was because the next part of the expedition would be when everyone was relying on her team. It was the first exploration mission that had needed a full psychiatric team on board, and she would no doubt be finding her way into new territory, maybe more so than all the physical scientists. They at least knew what they expected to find, there had been plenty of se
nsor readings from the surface before there was any need for people to come here directly. The research purpose of this journey was to see if people could really cope with living here, psychologically as well as physically, and how the human mind would cope with a step away from the world that was familiar to them. To know if the colonisation of alien worlds would always be just a dream.
It was hard to show a thumbs-up when all the straps of the acceleration couch held his hands in place. But Hallaran saw, she gave a nervous smile and raised her own thumb in response. She hadn’t cried on the way down, she was taking the physical abuse of the reentry much better than most of her colleagues. But they’d all known what they were in for, they all knew that it was a temporary discomfort. And as Lemuel flicked through all the other internal screens, he didn’t see any sign that his people weren’t coping.
His people. He’d started off thinking of them as the colonists, the crew. Then they were his crew, as he accepted that they were all depending on him to reach their destination, and then they were his people. He’d take responsibility for all of them, and there was no way he would let them be hurt.
The ship glided down, slowly approaching the ground while still racing over several miles of dusty brown mountains every minute. The pilots had their hands on the controls now, ready and waiting in case the autopilot had some difficulty. They were reading off numbers from the instruments, a background babble slowly becoming audible as the roar of the engines quieted.
“Landing site locked in,” the line was a part of the script that they’d all been told to memorise years before, “Radar confirmation, landing site is clear.”
“Target range three hundred miles,” another voice chipped in. Not the number on the instrument panel. As an international project this ship’s instruments were all calibrated in metric units, but someone in the press office had decided that they should read off distances in miles to appease the audiences back on Earth. In about an hour, audiences back home would be watching the live broadcast with almost as much excitement as the crew on board, and everything had to be perfect so they could feel like they were in the moment.
“Target range six hundred and forty miles,” Captain Tolok read off a few minutes later, “Confirmed operation of active braking.” A few members of the crew wondered if he was putting on a stronger accent for the media; they’d barely noticed it in the last six months, but suddenly it was back as strong as ever.
“Target range two hundred fifty miles,” the next announcement was minutes later, but there was a constant stream of chatter between pilots and engineers to fill the gap. To Commander Lemuel, it seemed the whole process was going too fast to process, but it was all going to plan. There was no response from Earth yet, they’d lost contact a few moments before they hit the atmosphere, but it wouldn’t be long before the orbital module could lock onto their position and start relaying signals again.
“Target range one hundred and sixty miles,” Tolok called, “Visual confirmation of final approach path.” Lemuel stared at the screens in front of him. In all the practise runs on the simulator, he’d almost found it funny, how pompous it could sound using longer words to say they could see the landing site on the horizon. But now he couldn’t think of anything but how many things could still go wrong, the massive risk to the whole crew. He was staring at the map now, watching as the little green triangle representing the ship got ever closer to the landing site. When the distance reading in the corner of the screen switched over to double figures, he didn’t miss his cue.
“Begin final approach,” he gave the command, knowing that the autopilots were still in control, and the final approach was starting even as he said it. Like everything else in this mission, it was a masterpiece of theatre and public relations, more than of science.
“Yes, sir!” the pilots chorused.
Everything went according to the script as the distance counted down to landing. Someone ad-libbed a half joke after the report that they had visual confirmation the landing site was free of large debris. There was always going to be one deviation, and Commander Lemuel carefully didn’t notice who was responsible. Maria didn’t need to start her life on a new planet with disciplinary action. And then when they were almost set down, speed a little under two hundred kilometres per hour, there was an alarm and a shout of panic.
“Landing pod four failed to deploy!” And then everyone was shouting at once. Lemuel could move his arms now, though they were still aching from the reentry, and he popped loose the upper straps on his harness so that he could quickly flick through different reports on his screen. He didn’t need to give emergency orders, everyone knew exactly what they were doing even in the chaos. He had a few lines on his script, but this was no time for panic. He wasn’t prepared to speak over experts who had useful information to add. They were coping with the crisis as well as could be expected, and it would only be a minute before they knew how well the crew had done.
“Brace for landing!” he called out. Everyone who wasn’t already staring at the screens pressed themselves firmly into their own impact couches, trying to relax and minimise any possible injury. And the the ship shook, sirens blared, a dozen notifications on the main screen showed problems with the landing skids, the hull, the atmosphere, the ship’s stability, and a dozen ancillary systems.
The roar of the engines stopped, unheard under the blaring of a dozen klaxons, and the babble of voices over the intercom stopped for just a moment as they touched the ground. A minute later, everything was still.
“We’re in one piece,” Commander Lemuel called out, making sure his announcement carried to every part of the ship, “And we’re on the ground. Well done, everyone, and welcome to Mars!”
There was a cheer. It would be reported in the news that every person onboard cheered at the same moment, although that wasn’t technically true. There were already a dozen engineers struggling to repair damage from the rough landing, and some of them were too engrossed in their tasks to remember they should be whooping in triumph. In the minutes that followed, when fewer people were watching from Earth, Commander Lemuel went through all the major systems, asking for summary reports to confirm what the computers were telling him.
Part of the landing apparatus had failed, getting jammed by atmospheric dust as it deployed. A chance piece of grit blowing on the wind could disrupt even the most carefully laid plans. That had changed their atmospheric drag, and thrown the ship slightly off balance. Then when they hit the ground, the dust had shifted under their weight, and they’d skidded, scraping across loose rocks a little more roughly than expected. It wasn’t a disaster, and the damage to the hull was mostly cosmetic. They’d lost around a thousand litres of breathable atmosphere, but they already knew they could replace that. A few sections had to be evacuated and sealed to prevent further loss, but that was something there were procedures laid down for in the technical manuals. About the biggest problem they had was that they were a hundred and sixty metres away from the planned landing site.
Three people were injured in the landing. Engineers who’d already been out of their seats, scurrying to fix problems, and one person who hadn’t been strapped in firmly enough. The worst injury was a sprained wrist.
Commander Lemuel ordered double checks on the atmosphere cycling, as well as manual inspection of every inch where the hull was in contact with the ground. They wouldn’t find any problems, he was sure, but this was the time when he wasn’t willing to take any chances, with anything.
* * *
Day 6
Days passed, almost a week. Slowly, the people who had spent years on a journey started to settle into a different routine. They spent less time in front of screens learning about their new world, less time in simulators practising some task, and less time on exercise machines to ensure their muscles didn’t waste away in microgravity. Now, everyone felt weak and tired all the time as they adapted to life on the ground again, but the technology gave them as much support as it could. Within a week, th
ey were sure the aeroponic farming pods were still growing as well as could be expected, and that they had enough food to keep them fit.
There was no time to rest, though. The ship was lying half embedded in the dusty surface, and they would need to move it before all the habitation modules could be transferred to the ground around the ship. Some people were living on the ship still, their quarters tilted by a couple of degrees due to the rough landing, while others connected their homes together with high quality lightweight tubing to make a pressurised colony.
More days passed, and they started to feel secure enough that each new day was no longer an achievement.
* * *
Day 15
Now that the camp had enough space for everyone to live, and they were sure that all the systems were in place to continue providing them with food, water, and air, they could start devoting time to the various research projects they’d wanted to do on Mars.
The most important job for the new Martians, though, was to prepare a proper landing strip for the ships that would follow them. They needed to test the surface with loaded buggies, and take measurements with ground penetrating radar, to find a safe landing point that wouldn’t collapse under a ship’s weight. And then they had to set up foundries and refineries to make materials from the local sand, and build a port to welcome the ships that would be arriving five weeks later.
Now, like on the journey, they were alone. There was a pulse laser transmission to the orbital modules above them, which would be relayed back to the rest of the fleet, and on to the people back on Earth. But the communications there were all business, all the time. Everything was monitored, to make sure that the sponsors back home were getting their money’s worth, and the crews were remaining on task. To people who’d grown up with instant messengers to communicate with friends all over the planet, any time, day or night, it was strange to find there was no unmonitored feed. Even messages to a friend on another ship had to be passed on by Mission Control on Earth, and scrutinised by their sponsors, until some of the engineers started putting together an unofficial shortwave radio network. That was something the sponsors would have done well to think about; if you’re hiring the best technical minds of a generation, you can’t just expect them not to do something.