by Pete Molina
Chapter 26
They were only one hour away, and they still had a ways to go to get the container ready for its wild ride. As it turned out, to Terra’s surprise, Jeff wasn’t a bad engineer. He’d obviously done a lot more than run the restoration division in his short time. Ignus was also very resourceful. Between the four of them they’d already fitted several of the spare thruster packs onto the container to decelerate it and they were now working on getting the deceleration airbags attached so that once deployed they’d provide enough cushioning for the shock of landing. Sam was working on the fog restraint system inside the container, giving it some extra instructions that would hopefully keep them safe in the event of an emergency.
“It’ll work, don’t worry,” Ignus assured, seeing Terra standing there in the cargo bay watching them attach one of the bags. “I had to deliver a load, in kind of the same manner on the moon once. Of course one sixth is a long way from the one third of Mars. But it’ll work.”
“Yeah, as long as all the thruster packs fire and all the bags deploy; otherwise we’re toast,” Sam said with a smile. It wasn’t reassuring, but it was their only recourse now. They didn’t have any other plans or the time to implement them if they did.
The plan was pretty simple. Right when the Express went into its final deceleration burn, the container, which they would move to the outside before the maneuver, would detach and continue on towards the planet at a much faster speed. The container was small enough that it would probably escape detection, but no one was sure of that. Any military vessel in the area would be sure to see it happen.
Once they made it to the surface, hopefully before any opposition could arrive, they would head straight to the Gates family dome which should only be a few kilometers away. Once there they would use one the airlocks and get inside. After that they should be safe. The vote wasn’t for five or six hours so they should have plenty of time. They would then use the camouflage to get to the vote without being discovered. It wasn’t a complicated plan, but it all hinged on the container being able to make the ground without a hitch.
The thrusters and the deceleration bags were standard pieces of equipment for a ship to carry. As such they were tightly regulated because lives always depended on them. They failed only rarely and they were always used redundantly in case one did fail. Unfortunately, the Express, being a relatively small ship, didn’t have that many onboard, so they had only the minimum number required with none left over. It made Terra nervous to think about it, and she had been thinking about it constantly since they thought the idea up. If she could find another way, she would take it in a heartbeat, but she had to be at that vote, and she couldn’t get there the normal way by shuttle to the surface. Ariel Stoneman would make sure of that.
“All right the fog mods are made,” Sam announced, moving away from the container where Jeff and Ignus were fitting the last deceleration bag. “It should work better than it did. Those things aren’t programmed to compensate for landings like the one we’re planning. I just hope it’s all worth the effort.”
“Me too, but I can’t let that woman get control of Mars,” Terra said vehemently. “There’s no telling what she’d do if she did.”
“Hey, easy. We’ll get there,” Sam assured her, putting his hand on her shoulder. If he had done such a thing before they left Earth, she would have thought him presumptuous, but in the last few days there had been a growing sense of camaraderie both because of the work on the container and their mutual goal of finding Sam 6.7.
“I know. Just got a little pre-launch anxiety. Nothing to worry about, right?” Terra was feeling a little queasy. She wasn’t the kind of person who took big physical risks. Political risks, yes, but this was crazy. The more the she thought about it, the more she started to stress.
Your pulse is rising and the amount of adrenaline in your system is spiking, Plato warned her.
I know, I feel it! Terra replied. She tried to breath in through her mouth and out through her nose a few times.
“Right,” Sam replied.
“If it makes you feel any better, Terra, my stomach is doing summersaults,” Jeff admitted with one hand on his stomach. “It’ll stop after we launch.”
“Yeah, but then we’ll have real motion sickness to deal with,” Terra sighed.
Jeff just shrugged.
“Well, I think that’s it. Darla can you please run the preflight check on the thrusters and the airbags?” Ignus requested, standing back from the container.
“All diagnostics return good status,” Darla informed them.
“Thank you,” Ignus replied. “You all ready? You’ve got about ten minutes before we need to load you and get you outside. Then you’ll just have to wait out there for deceleration to complete, and off you’ll go.”
“Thanks, Ignus. You’ve been a real help here,” Terra said sincerely. “I won’t forget it.”
“Just come back for those follow up charters, that’s all I ask,” Ignus said. The amount Terra was offering would accelerate the payoff of the ship by at least a decade, and it wouldn’t be through Fed-Ex who would have taken a large cut.
“If our business takes us off Mars, you’ll be the first to know,” Terra assured him.
“Well, you all better get suited up now…and don’t forget to use the restroom. It’ll help your nerves…trust me,” Ignus offered.
At that they returned to their cabins upstairs and gathered their belongings. Terra lifted the shoebox sized cylinder out of her emergency closet as Ignus had instructed, took off her clothing, and lifted the cylinder above her head twisting open the port on the top. A black liquid like substance flowed down over her and flowed to cover her entire body. She set down the canister and the rest of her hand was enveloped.
For a moment things went dark, and she couldn’t breathe as the suit material covered her face. Then the material around her face became transparent and she breathed in deeply, the suit supplying her with air. It’d been a few years since she’d been in one of these suits. When she was younger, she’d like to go for walks on the surface of Mars, but as she’d grown older and had taken on more and more responsibility, she hadn’t had a lot of time for that. Still, the experience would come in very handy when they landed.
Terra scooped up her clothes and stuffed them in the end of the space suit storage cylinder. She didn’t have anything else, so she opened the door to her cabin and went back into the main room. The door to Sam and Jeff’s cabin was open and she couldn’t see them so she headed back down in to the cargo bay. As she began to descend, she looked below and saw two jet black figures with only their heads looking semi normal, as if they were hidden behind a half inch of glass. Jeff had a lump at his belt which Terra assumed was his external companion computer.
“Ready?” Ignus asked. “Then let’s get this show going.” He indicated the container which now had its side open again.
“Just a minute,” Jeff said. “We’ve got one more piece of apparel to don?” He took the three canisters which had been sitting next to his suit canister and handed one to Sam and one to Terra. “They should be good for at least four hours. They can interface with your suit and through it your companion. If necessary, they can draw power from it.”
Terra and Sam took theirs and poured the contents over their heads, Jeff did the same. “Just put it in passive mode. That’ll save power while we land.”
Terra interfaced with her companion and had Plato switch into passive mode.
“And what’s all this, then?” Ignus asked.
“Just a little extra help,” Jeff said. He suddenly disappeared and only a slight shimmer appeared where he’d been standing.
“Neat trick,” Ignus commented, as Jeff reappeared.
“Just a little Newbie ingenuity,” Sam added. They all made their way to the container and bent down to get inside. They each took one of the three remaining restraint chairs, they’d removed the other one earlier t
o save mass.
“You all tucked in then?” Ignus asked, his hands on the top of the opened door, ready to close it.
“Yep.”
“Ready.”
“Let’s do it.”
“All right then, I’m closing it now. Good luck. And don’t forget to call if you need me,” Ignus reminded them. Then he closed the door.
It was dark for a moment until the interior screens came on and they could once again see the cargo room. Ignus made his way to the lift column and disappeared shortly thereafter up into the main room on his way to the bridge. After a minute the container lifted up several feet off the ground and a large cargo door slid open on the side of the ship, revealing the stars.
The container moved quickly to the opening which was sealed by a thick layer of transparent fog that was holding in the ship’s internal pressure from the outside vacuum. As the container passed through the opening, the fog held them firmly as the interior pressure tried to blow them outward. Then it gently moved the container away from the door and down the exterior of the cylinder that made up the cargo and crew section. The cargo door closed behind them, and they stopped as the container was securely connected to the ship’s hull by the fog.
“Looks like we’re ready then,” Jeff said. They could see Mars off in the distance. It was becoming larger by the second as they approached.
“Get ready for final deceleration,” Ignus’ voice came over their suit radios via a tight transmission that hopefully wouldn’t be picked up by eavesdroppers. “Five minutes.”
They waited silently. Jeff had his hand on his stomach which was in turn making Terra’s own a little queasy.
Sam seemed perfectly calm as he stared out the window. “Hey, is that the orbital mirror over there?” he asked, pointing.
“Yep. Melting the permafrost and boosting the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere,” Terra explained. The mirror was just becoming visible over the limb of the planet.
“It’s huge,” Sam commented.
“Four hundred kilometers in diameter,” Terra noted. It’d been there for about seventy years now. She could hardly recall the sky without it. It was almost like a second sun.
“And it just hovers there?” Sam said with youthful exuberance.
Terra smiled. “Yes, just solar radiation pressure keeps it permanently above the poles.”
“It must have been pretty hard to build.”
No wonder his other version became an engineer; it was just in his nature to wonder about how things were constructed, with no thought for the politics, Terra thought.
“It was even harder to get it approved,” Terra said, remembering the hours of arguments over a half century between the environmentalists, who wanted Mars preserved in its original state and the terraformists who wanted a atmosphere thick enough to allow plants and unsuited travel outside the domes. The terraformists had won finally, and then the mirror had taken five years to engineer and fabricate.
“I’ll bet,” Sam said.
“Thirty seconds. Get ready,” Ignus said over the speaker.
Terra had momentarily forgotten their current situation as she had been remembering that past battle over the mirror. She was grateful Sam had been able to distract her. She had to keep reminding herself how young he really was.
The Express’ motors kicked on at three-g’s, not a tremendous force for deceleration, but it made Terra’s stomach turn as they were pulled sideways.
“We should have oriented the container the other way,” Jeff said. The restraint fog and the chairs were holding them still but internally they could all feel the forces.
“Too late now,” Sam grimaced.
The burn would continue for five minutes as the Express came into orbit, but at four minutes the container detached from the ship and a small compressed gas thruster on the shipward side fired, moving them outward and away from the express. They quickly fell away from the still decelerating ship, and they were now back in free fall as they hurtled toward the planet that had grown to fill the entire screen.
Jeff was the one who was interfaced with the container’s small computer system that was controlling the sequencing of their thrusters and deceleration bags. “We enter the atmosphere in two minutes.”.
As they entered the atmosphere at its most tenuous level, small maneuvering thrusters turned them to face the large thruster on the bottom of the container towards their velocity vector and fired. It slowed them down considerably. Their trajectory now, instead of leading them to skip off the atmosphere back into space, became a ballistic course that would hopefully land them in the right spot.
When the thruster finished its firing, Terra gave a sigh of relief that they had passed the first hurdle. Doubtless they would have been rescued, but flying off in to space would have delayed them probably long enough for Ariel Stoneman to find out who was onboard and make sure they didn’t make the vote. Now their only problem was landing, as opposed to crashing. They plummeted downward on a trip that didn’t take long as the features of the surface rapidly became more visible. Terra could see out of one of the screens the main domes of Olympia. They at least seemed to be on target.
“We’re on a good trajectory,” Jeff assured them, focusing on the images his companion was feeding him from the container’s recently added sensors. “Firing the second thruster.” Again a kick and they slowed their descent. After ten seconds the thrusters stopped, and again the feeling of free-fall returned.
Terra could see the Gates family dome now set a few kilometers away from the main dome cluster. They were still falling rapidly and accelerating as the one-third gravity pulled them closer.
“We’re at ten thousand meters,” Jeff marked. He counted them off a thousand meters at a time until they reached a thousand.
“Firing third thruster.” Again the kick and the return of a slight weight. “Five hundred, we’re at twenty meters per second.” Four hundred, three, two. “Firing final thruster. Five meters per second. Deploying deceleration bags.” There was a hissing sound as the airbags inflated to completely protect the container.
Then they hit. The bags absorbed most of the force, but it was still quite jarring although it could have been much much worse. They bounced and tumbled for another minute as they container came to a stop as it gently collided with something on the ground. The restraint chairs and the fog held them firmly in place. The bags deflated and they were lowered to the ground.
“Everybody all right?” Jeff asked. It was now completely dark in the container which was also resting on its side, though thankfully not the side with the door.
“Yeah,” Terra answered. It hadn’t been as bad as she thought, but she didn’t want to ever have to do that again. She preferred the ferry from orbit with its totally controlled descent and gentle touchdown to their quick and dirty method.
“That was great!” Sam exclaimed. “Makes you feel just like the little rover Sojourner must have felt bouncing all around.”
“It didn’t have even an SS system. It couldn’t have felt anything,” Terra said, though she was impressed that he knew his history so well at such a young age.
“Still gives you that connection with a little ancient Mars history,” Jeff added. “Let’s get out of here.” He made his chair release him and he fell the short distance to the wall of the container. From there he moved to the side that opened and hit the release.
Terra and Sam waited, not wanting to get in the way until it was open. It opened partially, about a meter, and then became stuck on something, but it was enough. Jeff stepped out onto the surface. Terra released herself and followed him out. They had landed almost exactly where they had planned; they were off by a few hundred meters because of the bouncing and rolling, but all together they’d done well. The canyon was still partially in the shadows, the Sun was only just rising, the darkness would conceal the container for at least another few hours as the sun worked
its way overhead.
Sam crawled out of the container and took in the surroundings. “Wow, we really hit it on the nose, didn’t we?”
“We sure did,” Jeff replied. Terra was just taking in the sight. She was home. They didn’t even notice that they had been detected and were already being watched by four Marines.