Bisesa looked that way. She saw a disk that must have been kilometers across. It glinted with reflected sunlight, and shuddering waves spread across it.
“That’s the solar-sail factory,” Alexei murmured. “They lay down the webbing and spray on the boron film—they spin it up from the start, to hold it rigid against the Moon’s gravity…”
That glinting disk seemed to spin, and ripple, and then, without warning, it peeled neatly away from the mare surface as if being budded, and drifted up toward space, oscillating as it rose.
“It’s beautiful,” Bisesa said.
Alexei shrugged. “Pretty, yes. To be honest most of us don’t find the Moon very interesting. They aren’t true Spacers down there. Not when you can commute to Earth in a day or two. We call it Earth’s attic…”
Max murmured, “Closest approach coming up.”
Now the whole Moon was shifting across Bisesa’s field of view. Craters flooded with shadow fled before the fragile windows of the bridge. Bisesa felt Myra’s hand tighten on her own. There are some sights humans just weren’t meant to see, she thought helplessly.
Then the Moon’s terminator fled over them, a broken line of illuminated peaks and crater walls, and they were plunged into a darkness broken only by the pale glow of Earthlight. As the sun’s harsh light was cut off the lightship lost its thrust, and Bisesa felt the loss of that tiny fraction of gravity.
17: WARSHIP
John Metternes came bustling up to the flight deck of the Liberator.
Edna asked, “Everything nominal?”
“Bonza,” the ship’s engineer said. He was breathless, the soft Belgian accent under his acquired Australian making his sibilants a rasp. “We got the mag bottles loaded and interfaced without blowing our heads off in the process. All the protocols check out, the a-matter pods are being good enough to talk to us…Yes, we’re nominal, and fit to launch. And about bloody time.”
Around forty, he was a burly man who was sweating so hard he had stained his jumpsuit armpits all the way through the protective layers. And there was a slight crust around his mouth. Perhaps he had been throwing up again. Though he had a nominal navy rank as a lieutenant commander, and was to fly with the Liberator as the chief engineer, John had come to space late; he was one of those unfortunates whose gut never adapted to microgravity. Not that that would make any difference when the A-drive cut in, for in flight the Liberator would thrust at a full gravity.
Edna tapped at a softscreen, skimmed the final draft of her operation order, and checked she had clearance from her control on Achilles. “The launch window opens in five minutes.”
Metternes looked alarmed, his broad stubbly face turning ashen. “My word.”
“You okay with this? The automated count is already underway, but we can still scrub if—”
“Good God, no. Ah, look—you took me aback, is all, didn’t know it was as quick as that. The sooner we get on with it the better. And anyhow something will probably break before we get to zero; it generally does…Libby, schematics please.”
The big window in front of them clouded over, replacing the view of Achilles and its backdrop of stars with a side-elevation graphic of the Liberator herself, a real-time image projected from sensors on Achilles and elsewhere. When John tapped sections of it the hull turned transparent. Much of the revealed inner workings glowed a pastel green, but red motes flared in scattered constellations to indicate outstanding engineering issues, launch day or not.
The design was simple, in essence. The Liberator looked like nothing so much as a Fourth of July firework, a rocket no less than a hundred meters in length, with habitable compartments stuck on the front end and an immense nozzle gaping at the back. Most of the hull was stuffed with asteroid-mined water ice, dirty snow that would serve as the reaction mass that would drive the ship forward.
And buried somewhere in the guts of the ship, near that nozzle, was the antimatter drive.
Liberator’s antimatter came in tiny granules of frozen hydrogen—or rather anti-hydrogen, stuff the propulsion engineers called “H-bar.” For now it was contained inside a tungsten core, isolated from any normal matter by immaterial electromagnetic walls, the containment itself requiring huge energies to sustain.
H-bar was precious stuff. Because of its propensity to blow itself up on encountering normal matter, antimatter didn’t sit around waiting to be collected, and so had to be manufactured. It occurred as a by-product of the collision of high-energy particles. But Earth’s mightiest accelerators, if run continually, would produce only tiny amounts of antimatter—even the great alephtron on the Moon was useless as a factory. A natural source had at last been found in the “flux tube” that connected the moon Io to its parent Jupiter, a tube of electrical current five million amperes strong, generated as that moon ploughed through Jupiter’s magnetic field.
To mine antimatter, all you had to do was send a spacecraft into the flux tube and use magnetic traps to sift out antimatter particles. But there was a world of engineering challenge in that “all.”
When Edna gave the order the magnetic fields would pulse, firing out the H-bar pellets one by one to hammer into an oncoming stream of normal hydrogen. Matter and antimatter would annihilate, every scrap of mass flashing immediately to energy. Asteroid ice would be sublimated to superheated steam, and it was that steam, hurtling out of the nozzle, that would push Liberator forward.
That was really all there was to it, aside from the hugely tricky details of handling the antimatter: Liberator was a steam rocket. But it was the numbers that were so impressive. Even the great mass-gobbling that went on in the fusing heart of the sun converted only a small percentage of fuel mass to energy. When matter and antimatter annihilated they went all the way; you just couldn’t get more juice out of Einstein’s famous E equals mc squared.
As a result, a mere pinch of antimatter, just fifty milligrams or so, would provide the equivalent of all the energy stored aboard the great chemical-rocket launch systems, like the space shuttle. That was what made the new antimatter drive so useful to governments intent on giving themselves a fast-response capability in the face of an invasion of the solar system. The Liberator was a ship so powerful it would deliver Edna to the Q-bomb, half Jupiter’s distance away, as far as from Earth to the asteroids, in just a hundred and twelve hours.
The Liberator would have been dwarfed by the Spacers’ lightships. But where a lightship was all spiderweb and sail, the Liberator was a solid mass, a club, a weapon. And the design was stupendously phallic, like so many of mankind’s weapon systems in the past, as more than one observer had wryly remarked.
There really wasn’t much for John to do; Libby handled the details of a countdown that was as simple as it could be made to be. John grew steadily more nervous.
“We’re being watched,” Edna said evenly, to distract him.
“We are? Who by?”
“From Achilles. Engineers, administrators, other crew.”
Edna cleared the screen and they glanced down at the ice moon’s surface. The graving dock crawled with spacesuited figures.
“Well, so much for the safety protocols,” John muttered. “What are they doing there?”
Libby replied, “I imagine they have come to watch the launch of mankind’s first spacegoing warship.”
“Wow,” John whispered. “She’s right. Remember Star Wars, Star Trek?”
Edna had never heard of these ancient cultural relics.
“It all begins here,” John said. “The first warship. But surely not the last, my word.”
“Thirty seconds,” Libby said evenly.
“Thank crap for that,” John said. He clutched the arms of his couch.
This was real, Edna thought suddenly. She was committed; she really was going to ride this ship into battle against an unknown foe, propelled by a drive that had been tested in anger only a couple of times, in a ship so new it still smelled of metal polish.
Libby said, “Three, two, one.”
Some
where in the guts of the ship a magnetic trap flexed. Matter died.
And Edna was shoved back into her chair with a thrust that drove the breath from her lungs.
18: MARS
The journey wore away.
Even now Alexei wouldn’t allow any communications about sensitive matters, or even “loose talk” in the cabin of the Maxwell, in this tiny volume drifting millions of kilometers from the nearest human. “You never know who’s listening.” And though the space was bigger than aboard the spider, the paper partitions weren’t very soundproof, and Myra and Bisesa felt they had no real privacy.
Nobody talked. They were just as shut-in a crew as they had been on the spider.
After a timeless interval marked only by the gradual dwindling of the sun, Mars loomed out of the dark. Bisesa and Myra peered curiously through the bridge windows.
The approaching world was a sculpture of orange-red, its surface pocked and wrinkled, with a broad smearing of gray mist across much of the northern hemisphere. Compared to Earth, which from space was as bright as a daylight sky, Mars looked oddly dark to Bisesa, murky, sullen.
But as the lightship looped around dwindling orbits she learned to read the landscape. There were the battered southern uplands, punctuated by the mighty bruise of Hellas, and to the north the smoother, obviously younger plains of the Vastitas Borealis. Bisesa was struck how big everything was on Mars. The Valles Marineris canyon system stretched around nearly a quarter the planet’s circumference, and the Tharsis volcanoes were a gross magmatic distortion of the whole planet’s shape.
So much she might have seen had she visited in 1969 rather than 2069. But today Mars’s air was streaked by brilliant white water-vapor clouds. And on one orbit the Maxwell’s path took them right over the summit of Olympus itself, where black smoke pooled in a caldera wide enough to have swallowed up New York City.
If the scars of the sunstorm were evident on this new face of Mars, so was the handiwork of mankind. The largest settlement on Mars was Port Lowell, an equatorial splash of silver on the fringe of the battered southern uplands. Roads snaked away to all points of the compass, reminiscent of the rectilinear tracery of canals that the last pre-spaceflight observers had imagined they had seen on Mars. And amid the roads and the domes were splashes of green: life from Earth, flourishing under glass in the soil of Mars.
But Myra pointed out more green, a belt of it stretching across the northern plains, and puddled in the great deep bowl of Hellas, a darker, more somber strain. That had nothing to do with Earth.
Alexei told Bisesa that they would spend a few nights at Lowell. As soon as a surface rover was free she was to travel on, heading north—all the way to the pole of Mars, she learned, with gathering incredulity. She peered down at that dense lid of northern fog, wondering what waited for her beneath its murk.
They spent a whole day floating above Mars, as the gentle pressure of sunlight regularized the Maxwell’s orbit. Then a squat, boxy craft came lumbering up from Lowell.
The shuttle’s sole occupant was a woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Dressed in a bright green coverall she was slender, rather fragile looking, and her face, open, somewhat empty, bore a neat ident tattoo. “Hi. I’m Paula. Paula Umfraville.”
When Paula smiled directly at her, Bisesa gasped. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”
“Don’t worry. A lot of people from Earth have the same reaction. I’m flattered, really, that people remember my mother so well…”
For Bisesa’s generation Helena Umfraville’s face had become one of the most famous in all the human worlds: not just for her participation in the first manned mission to Mars, but for the remarkable discovery she had made just before her own death. Paula might have been her double.
“I’m not important.” Paula spread her arms wide. “Welcome to Mars! I think you’re going to be intrigued by what we’ve found here, Bisesa Dutt…”
The shuttle’s descent was a smooth glide. As Bisesa watched, the wrinkled face of Mars flattened into a dusty landscape, and ocher light seeped across the sky.
Paula talked all the way down, perhaps delivering a patter intended to reassure nervous passengers. “I usually find myself apologizing to visitors from Earth—and especially if they’re heading for the poles, as you are, Bisesa. Here we are coming down at latitude ten north, and we’ll have to haul you all the way to the polar cap overland from here. But all the support facilities are here at Lowell, and the other colonies close to the equator, because the equatorial belt was all those first-generation chemical-engine ships could reach…”
Myra was more interested in Paula than in Mars. She said awkwardly, “I went into astronautics after the sunstorm. Helena Umfraville was a hero of mine—I studied her life. I never knew she had a daughter.”
Paula shrugged. “She didn’t, before she left for Mars. But she wanted a child. She knew that on the Aurora 1 she would spend months bathed in deep-space radiation. So before she departed she left behind eggs, other genetic material. It was transferred to a Hibernaculum during the sunstorm. And after the storm was over, my father—well. Here I am. Of course my mother never knew me. I like to think she would have been proud that I’m here on Mars, in a way carrying on her work.”
“I’m sure she would be,” Bisesa said.
The touchdown was brisk and businesslike, on a pad built of a kind of glass, melted out of the crust. Bisesa stared. This was Mars. Beyond the scarred surface of the pad everything was reddish-brown, the land, the sky, even the washed-out disk of the sun.
Within minutes a small bus with blister windows came bouncing up, puppy-like, on huge soft wheels. It was painted green, like Paula’s jumpsuit—of course, Bisesa thought, you would use green to stand out on red Mars. Bisesa clambered through a docking tunnel, following Paula, with Alexei and Myra and their luggage and bits of kit. The bus, with rows of plastic seats, might have come from any airport on Earth.
As the bus rolled off Paula chattered about the landscape. She seemed proud of it, engaging in her enthusiasm. “We’re actually on the floor of a canyon called the Ares Vallis. This is an outflow canyon, shaped by catastrophic flooding in the deep past, draining from the southern uplands.”
That ancient calamity had lasted just ten or twenty days, it was thought, a few weeks billions of years past when a river a thousand times as mighty as the Mississippi had battered its way through the ancient rocks. This sort of event had, it seemed, occurred all around the great latitudinal frontier where Mars’s south met its north; the whole of the northern hemisphere was depressed below the mean surface level, like one enormous crater imposed on half the planet.
“You can see why the Aurora crew were sent here for the first human exploration—and in fact why NASA sent its Pathfinder unmanned probe to the same area in the 1990s…”
Bisesa, peering out, tuned out the words. This dusty plain, littered with slablike boulders, was Earthlike, and yet immediately not Earthlike. How strange it was that she could never touch those dusty rocks, or taste that thin iron air.
As they neared the domes of Lowell they passed cylinders mounted vertically on tripods. To Bisesa they looked like the power lasers of a space elevator. The Martians didn’t have their beanstalk yet, it seemed, but they had the power sources in place.
And the bus rolled past flags that fluttered limply over markers of Martian glass. Bisesa supposed Paula’s mother was here, with those others of Bob Paxton’s crew who had not survived their stranding on Mars. If Ares’s geology was forever shaped by that tremendous flood in the deep past, so its human history would surely always be shaped by the heroism of the Aurora crew.
The bus drove them up to the largest of the domes and docked smoothly.
They passed through a connecting tunnel and emerged in a warren of internal partitions, lit by big fluorescent tubes suspended from a silvered roof. Bisesa felt very self-conscious as she walked into the dome, practicing her Mars lope. The noise levels were high, echoing.
People bustled
by, many dressed in green jumpsuits like Paula’s. They all seemed busy, and few of them glanced at Bisesa and her party. Bisesa guessed that to these locals she would be about as welcome as tourists at a South Pole base on Earth.
Alexei felt moved to apologize. “Don’t mind this. Just remember, every breath you take has to be paid for out of somebody’s taxes…”
Bisesa did notice that very few of the Martians wore ident tattoos on their cheeks.
They dumped their luggage in rooms provided for them in a cramped, shacklike “hotel,” and Paula offered to fill their few hours at Lowell with a tour. So they went exploring, following Paula, working their way from dome to half-inhabited dome through tunnels that were sometimes so low they had to crouch.
They bought their own lunch at an automated galley. Their Earth credit was good, but the bowls of sticky soup and bitter coffee they bought were expensive.
As they ate, a gang of schoolkids ran by, laughing. They were skinny, gangly, all at least as tall as Bisesa, though with their slim bodies and fresh faces it was hard to tell how old they were. They ran with great bounds.
Alexei murmured, “First-generation Martians. Grown from conception under low gravity. The next generation, their children, will be very interesting…”
Bisesa was sorry when they had passed out of sight, taking their splash of human warmth with them.
One big translucent dome enclosed a farm. They walked between beds of lettuces and cabbages, all proud and healthy, and shallow ponds that served as rice paddies, and trestle tables bearing pans of some turgid fluid from which grew beans and peas and soya. There were even fruit trees, oranges and apples and pears growing in pots, obviously precious and lovingly tended. In here they were at last exposed to pink Martian daylight, but the light of the remote sun was supplemented by banks of hot white lamps.
But they walked on quickly. Under a faint scent of some industrial perfume was the cloying stench of sewage.
They reached the dome’s translucent wall, and Bisesa saw rows of plants marching away, set into the soil beyond the dome. She noticed how they glinted, oddly glassy, and the green of their oddly shaped leaves was a deeper shade than the bright plants around her.
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