The scientists might well be at Korolev for six or even ten years. No one knew how long it might be before we could safely move any of the many Tiberian artifacts; we were not going to run the risk of losing anything this time before it had been thoroughly recorded in situ.
“Everyone is aboard, sir,” Mark Bene, the return pilot, said, raising his voice to be heard. It was nice to hear a familiar voice. Though we hadn’t been close friends, we’d been together in the First Aerospace for some years. He closed the hatch.
“All right, everyone, keep the noise down so we can think,” Gander said. The scientists subsided into whispers and got on with business, checking their bins—more things were found packed wrong, but nothing was missing—and rechecking readouts from the ship’s systems, as a final backup in case the officers had somehow missed something.
Having finished my checkouts, I watched our scientific team. It was a slightly disorienting way to see them because all of us were almost lying on our backs in the acceleration couches, so it was sort of like looking down the side of a nine-tiered bunk bed.
The first one who caught my eye—because he seemed to command attention from everyone, all the time—was Narihara Nigawa; mostly we just called him Nari. He was a handsome man, just half a centimeter under the maximum height for the mission, muscular and quick. He’d played guard on Waseda University’s basketball team and third base on their baseball team, and still found time to learn to fly and finish a Ph.D. before he was twenty-five; he was the one who had raised the question about the mixture of Tiberian technology that no one had an answer for. Supposedly he was engaged to someone back home, but none of us had met her, and the couple of times that he and I had gone out for a beer together, he certainly hadn’t acted like he was settled for life.
Right now he was almost laughing to himself with pure excitement, running over the readouts and nodding. He had spent more than a year of his life on the Moon, been part of the Mars One landing, and had briefly visited Phobos, where apparently he’d found confirming evidence—the chunks of metal, plastic, and glass of Phobos, to the extent that they could be identified as anything, seemed to be mostly from his “early generation” of Tiberian technology. Besides being one of fewer than a dozen members so far of the “three-world club” of people who had visited the Moon, Phobos, and Mars, he was the Earth’s leading xenoengineering archeologist—an expert in figuring out Tiberian technology from the remains found on the Moon.
Having just confirmed, as all of us had, that everything was perfect, he turned across the aisle to say something to Paul Fleurant, a veteran astro-F and our computer wizard, a guy who knew more about artificial intelligence and genetic algorithms than just about anyone—and never let you forget how much he knew, either. Paul had been on Phobos Three going out on the Collins cycler in ‘22 and coming back with the Mars One crew in ‘27, and though he had never set foot on Mars, his place in Martian history was already secure. He had developed the programs that eventually allowed the robots on the Mars surface and the networked computers on Phobos to find the discontinuity and arrive at a date for it. He bent forward to hear what Nari was saying; then Paul’s thick eyebrows flew up, and he said something back that had Nari covering his mouth so as not to laugh out loud.
It was probably mildly risqué, because Kireiko, sitting in front of them, blushed and bent over her screen, intensely rechecking things that were already working fine. Kireiko seemed to be shy, and about all I knew about her was that she was a molecular biologist, expert in Tiberian biochemistry, married and had two young kids. There had been a big public outcry about her “deserting her children” to go on this mission; neither she nor her husband had spoken a public word on the subject through the several months of hate mail that had poured in. The other thing, which you couldn’t help knowing, was that she was beautiful.
Whatever it was about the joke that had bothered Kireiko apparently was very much to the taste of Tsen Chou-Zung, our doctor and expert on Tiberian anatomy, who was seated next to Kireiko. She snorted and said something that made Paul slap his thigh.
Next to me, Captain Gander took off his headset and said firmly, “It has come to my attention—courtesy of Dean at Control—that the media apparently can listen in to almost everything we say here. This apparently includes some jokes not entirely suitable for a family channel. So if you could all refrain—”
“Sorry,” Paul muttered, and everyone went back to the final recheck.
Olga, sitting all the way at the back in the engineer’s seat, leaned forward to confer with Mark Bene about something. I figured it was another comment about the whole conversation. Confirming that, Olga caught my eye and nodded, making half a smile. Paul was one of the several things she and I had discovered that we agreed about.
I glanced over the whole group; when you’re going to go live on Mars, I thought, a little excitement—especially in the people who don’t have to do any flying yet—is pretty natural. Paul and Nari were at least trying to stay focused on their screens; Tsen was conferring with Kireiko about something, both of them talking eagerly, though softly, at the same time.
As always, Vassily, the heavyset, bearded, quiet Russian who was probably the only human being with a triple doctorate in music, linguistics, and orbital mechanics, was keeping his own counsel. I had only heard him speak aloud a few times, but on the other hand the briefings he had written for the officers on the translation problems in analyzing Tiberian text had been fascinating. I had long ago admitted to myself that I found his intelligence intimidating, but admitting it didn’t make it any less so.
Next to him, Dong Te-Hua, the oldest and physically smallest member of the crew, had stopped pretending to run rechecks one more time, and was sitting quietly with his hands folded. He and Vassily hung out together because as an anthropologist, his specialty was closest to Vassily’s, and perhaps because neither of them liked to talk much. He was a pretty good guy. During the months when we three officers had been desperately trying to get completely caught up on the plans for extracting the Tiberian lander from its resting place under four meters of ice, he had been the one who most often made the time to explain a point of technique or to talk about what they were hoping to find.
That helped me a lot, because it was no easy task to keep track of what our mission specialists were working on. Exactly as Lori Kirsten had told me when I first took the job, the team we were taking to Mars was probably the heaviest concentration of brains per person since the Manhattan Project. Humanity had spent twenty-four years, since the wreck that killed my father and Xiao Be, getting ready for this mission. We needed brilliant people in fields that had never existed before—and on top of that, they had to be capable of a long-duration space mission, and of pioneering in the deadly dangerous wilderness of the Martian arctic. So far only two surface explorers had been killed at Korolev, but fewer than twenty had ever gone there at all.
Dean’s voice crackled in my ear. “How you doing up there, Yankee Clipper?”
“Ready here,” I said. “As far as I know we’re waiting on you.”
“Unh-hunh. We’re on private channel, Jason; you want the truth?”
“Why not?”
Dean’s voice had the tone of sour amusement that it often did; he tended to see the world as living down to his expectations. “The president of Russia is still in the bathroom, and they want to photograph all six presidents watching our departure. They, ah, expect him at any moment. Me, I’d say five out of six presidents is plenty.”
I exhaled a half-laugh. “Time and trajectory wait for no man. If he doesn’t get out here fast, we’ll just have to miss him,” I said. “Keep me posted, Dean.”
We were flying up to intercept Mars Five in low Earth orbit. The lower a satellite is, the less time it takes to go around the Earth, and the bigger an angle of the sky it cuts out in a given time. The MarsHab was only 300 kilometers up. It went from horizon to horizon in less than an hour, and we could only hit orbital velocity in one sma
ll part of the sky, so we had to go when it was time.
“Well, next time maybe he’ll remember to pee faster,” Dean said. “I’m starting the count.” There was a click as he switched the channel over to “open,” where everyone on board could hear and the media could listen in. “Yankee Clipper, this is Control. You are go in one minute,” Dean added.
“Roger, Control, Mars Five is go,” Gander said, beside me.
I took one last glance around the screens in front of me; everything was fine, just as it had been. Then I took advantage of having a seat with a view to get a good last look at Earth up close. The blue ocean in the distance looked soft; I wondered how many shattered rockets and crew compartments lay under it. They had been launching from here for decades.
Dean said, “Yankee Clipper, we are at thirty seconds and holding. Are you ready?”
“Roger,” Walter said. “We’re go, Dean.”
The countdown began, the backwards count every American born since 1960 knew by heart, ending in “Ignition sequence start. . . ignition.” There was a thunder under our feet; the big rocket engines were running up to full power. I watched as the computer continued to execute the program, my hands on the manual controls in case of trouble.
We reached thrust for liftoff and the outside camera showed the gantry bridge falling away. In the upper left corner of the screen, I saw us rising majestically on a pillar of white-hot fire even as I felt the acceleration beginning to push me back into the couch. Physically a Yankee Clipper was a winged lifting body; the wings at the rear folded in like French doors, first the stabilizers and then a joint in the middle, flat against the sides, for takeoff and reentry, then deployed for landing. The short canard wing near the nose was also lying flat against the body and would scissor out when it was needed, the two microjets giving the Clipper more maneuverability for landing.
The body looked more like a stretched and squashed pyramid than anything else, coming to a point at the nose, much wider than it was thick, with four big engine nozzles just barely protruding from the back; in the external telecamera view, now, we formed a narrow arrowhead on a great tongue of flame. Acceleration was now steady at 3.2 g, and we were still headed straight up.
I looked through the heads-up display on the windscreen in front of me; it was a copy of the screen. Though only the oldest pilots now bothered looking out the window during launch—the screen was so much easier to read—I liked to see what happened to the color of the sky. The pale blue of Florida April was deepening into the kind of dark blue you get on very clear winter days, much farther north; we were at eighteen kilometers altitude, reaching into the tropopause, and now we were gaining velocity very rapidly.
We were closer to the trajectory line than I could have done manually; that’s the way it’s supposed to be, but I’d had to do more than enough overrides. I kept my eye on the screen and let the added weight of the acceleration sink me into the couch, rested my hands on the controls (my arms felt like lead) and looked into the sky through the heads-up display. The blue behind the colored graphs and pictures deepened steadily.
We were still hurtling upward at more than three gees. At forty Kilometers altitude, the sky was fully black. I let the computer continue to fly the ship as we arced over onto our initial orbital trajectory. They cut out the external telecamera view; by now we were just a bright streak in that view, and there was more useful information in the radar imaging. I watched as the indicators climbed and as the three graphs that showed our pathway all stayed well within the green ranges; we were right on course.
Taking manual control for the first time, I rolled us over for the view; people who weren’t going to see Earth again for years were entitled, I thought. Acceleration was still fierce, but because we were so far above the ground there was little sensation of great speed. In the windshield in front of us, and on the front cameras, the Earth came into view, seeming to hang above us because under acceleration “down” is toward the engines. It always got to me every time I saw this view: huge, a shade of blue you saw nowhere else, streaked with white and brown. Europe and Africa lay spread out across the windscreen. “Control, everything is go,” I said. “We are two minutes fourteen seconds from cutout.”
We thundered on into the sky. Now I could see the sunset line that stretched across India and on up into Siberia. As the computer counted down, we waited until the moment when suddenly the vibration ceased, the acceleration was lifted from us, and there was an instant of feeling as if we were falling before we settled into the familiar sensation of weightlessness. All the indicators showed that we were where we were supposed to be. “Control,” I said, “this is Yankee Clipper. We have achieved our designated orbit. Checking all systems before rendezvous with the MarsHab.”
“Looking good, Yankee Clipper. Check things out and get back to us. Special message for the pilot.”
I had just an instant to wonder what that could be before I heard Lori Kirsten.
“Jason,” she said, “this is Aunt Lori. Your mother said to tell you to be careful out there, and to write.”
There were not-very-suppressed giggles from the rest of the cabin behind me. I had a feeling that I could probably be doing this until I was seventy, and Aunt Lori—who would be about a hundred at that time— would still be teasing me. “Roger, Aunt Lori. My love to Mom and Sig.”
As we all stretched out the kinks you get from acceleration, Captain Gander said, “It can’t be entirely easy having Lori as both boss and family.”
“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” I said, “but sometimes it’s easier than others.”
He nodded. “Back when the world was young, she was the mission commander twice when I was piloting. I do believe it was then that I learned the importance of shutting up and letting the pilot fly.” He touched my elbow. “Nice job; no unnecessary action and you let things go right. Keep it smooth.” He unbuckled and pushed off, drifting back to confer with the scientists. Mark Bene came forward to take the second seat, and we put on headsets so we could talk to Olga, in the rear, without being bothered by the chatter.
For the next hour and a half, Olga, Mark, and I, assisted by everyone else, read and reread every output the Yankee Clipper could produce. Now, while we were still in low Earth orbit, and before we attempted rendezvous and docking with the MarsHab, was the time to make sure that absolutely everything was perfect with our craft, because if it wasn’t, this would be our easiest time to abort. The human race had struggled mightily to produce the seven brilliant minds for this expedition; we weren’t going to risk them on a faulty three-dollar part, if there was one.
There wasn’t. Everything was absolutely, perfectly right. As we finished the checkout, I looked back at Olga and found her looking forward at me, holding her thumb up, grinning. She brushed her short black hair from her face. “Well,” she said, “apparently we are perfect.”
Gander looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “The most thorough checkout in history has found no bugs, sir,” I said. I felt like whooping myself; it had been hammered at all of us, constantly, that if anything was even slightly wrong, we were to do the safest possible thing, whatever that might be. Too much could be lost too easily, and what we were doing, and would be doing later, was more than dangerous enough. No unnecessary risks was supposed to be our motto.
But difficult as that might be to achieve, it was our way to Mars—and we all wanted, desperately, to go to Mars now. If passing the safety check was the way to do it, we would pass it—and now we had, with flying colors.
Gander lifted his headset and slipped it back on. “Houston, this is Mars Five, on the Yankee Clipper. We are showing a completely clear set of readings and we are on our assigned orbit. Request permission to proceed to rendezvous and transfer.”
“Roger, Mars Five, you are cleared. Good luck.”
Without another word, we strapped in, glanced at everything one last time, and prepared to fire the engine again. The curved edge of Earth, white smeared on blue and im
mense, took up the whole top half of my window (if you define top as the direction your head points), stars showing below it. I thought a personal good-bye to it. We were only going a little farther up in this next burn, but the long far road we were taking was always in my mind, and I wanted to get going.
We counted down and fired the engine, our acceleration instantly providing us with the feeling of gravity, as if the Yankee Clipper were standing on the ground on her tail. There was vibration through the floor at my feet, but with no air to carry the sound, nothing like the roar of takeoff.
I kept my eyes on the trajectory guides, keeping us right in the middle of everything, as we ascended to a higher orbit. It’s a tricky process that goes against your intuition, and I’m certainly glad I’ve never had to try to do it without plenty of electronic helpers. But everything again stayed normal, and a few minutes later, still exactly on course, we shut off the burn and let ourselves coast upward toward apogee, where we would find our MarsHab.
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