Julia Markovic watched Dior's first
attempts to wrestle the plunging Dragon back onto a survivable path. Her
touchscreen was set to mirror what Dior was seeing. Julia had been trained as
the third reserve pilot, after Leo Fortuyn and Arnon Sable, and even that
remote possibility of having to land the big Red Dragon Mark Two had her hands trembling as
she gripped her armrests.
Clearly the top priority was to cancel
their rate of descent, but to do so Dior would need to use the Super Dracos,
which were pointing along the Dragon's trajectory at a shallow angle to the
ground. So she expertly kicked the rocket motors into 90% of maximum thrust,
used the ballast and the RCS to turn the Dragon to a more vertical angle, and
when the sudden g-force ceased and Julia could look up again, the Red Dragon
had attained a low rate of ascent and was still moving laterally towards the
planned landing area. They travelled in a long arc, reaching a high point
She could hear the pilot muttering to
herself in French as she jimmied the Super Dracos with a few gentle bursts. - Allez!
C'est naze. Ah - Ça roule. Tiens, Smaug, tu t'en sors?
Commander Sable kept a running report of
estimated lateral distance to the landing site, altitude and rate of descent.
"Range forty-nine, three thousand metres up, ROD one-oh-two."
Still the unruffled calm, but Julia imagined that the pitch of his voice had
risen by a semitone.
Throughout the long and gruelling training
period Julia had known that she could pull out, and that mistakes she made
almost always implied less than fatal consequences. All that was gone as they
fell sideways towards unyielding rock, completely in the hands of Dior Aubert.
If this truly was the end – and so many details could prove deadly now – what
had Julia's life amounted to? What was she losing? Her one glaring regret:
sacrificing the chance to have a family. But that was the choice she'd made.
One ambivalence, like an optical illusion that flickered from dark to light to
dark, depending on where you viewed it from: her failed marriage to Don. The
painful irony-in-hindsight of her choice had faded, crowded out by so much
else; she had long since stopped weighing the what-ifs.
"Range nine thousand metres, two
thousand five hundred up, ROD one-seven-five." And so it went on. She thought
this must be a new record for extreme stress endurance. Seconds seemed like minutes.
Then without any transition that Julia
noticed, they were preparing to land. Without the jostling and maneuvering she became more
aware of the gentle gravity of Mars, and a subdued daylight that peered in through
the Dragon's oval windows. The landing had been planned for the early morning,
and the late Spring in the northern hemisphere promised the grudging retreat of the extreme cold of winter.
"Seven hundred, fifty-eight, ROD
eighteen!" Julia heard Sable's suddenly alarmed tone and thought with
razor-like regret, So close, but now we've had it! The Dragon wasn't
designed to survive a landing at such a rate of descent.
Dior growled with a fierceness that implied
desperation, and the Super Dracos lit up briefly but forcefully one more time.
The cabin shrugged, bucked in protest at
the sudden obstruction of its descent by solid ground. The Dragon was still
upright. The rockets were still roaring as they hit, and even as they cut
out they felt the ship buck skywards, perhaps as much as a metre, only to flop
back down onto its deployed landing legs, which strained to absorb the impact. Julia's world rattled, and grew still.
The only sound for a few seconds was the
ticking of the overheated hull, cooling rapidly, and the dying hiss of
propellant as the Super Dracos slept again.
Julia breathed deeply. Now her limbs
betrayed her with the trembling of relief. How was this possible? How could she
have just landed on another planet? She blinked her wet eyes.
"Waaaa – hooo!" –
someone's wild yell; it could have been Leo.
"Thank God! We – we made it!"
That was July, her voice shaking slightly. The others joined in with
expressions of relief and what could only be light-headed joy.
Now Sable was utterly relaxed once more,
and enjoying himself. "And the first intelligible words spoken
on the surface of the new world were …?"
Hugo said, "Dior, you did it! That
was stupendous flying!"
Dior muttered something. She sounded
exhausted.
Sable said, "Hey, who do you think
you are – Neil Armstrong? How did you do that, Lieutenant Dior Aubert?"
Leo said, "What do you mean?"
Their commander coughed theatrically.
"Well, for the sake of the people watching and listening back home, here
we are just about five hundred metres from the ISRU unit and the Hab, and we
have – get this – about fifteen seconds' worth of propellant sloshing in the tanks."
He let that sink in for a moment. "Awesome. Totally awesome."
Dior raised her voice as if with an effort.
"I knew that. I think the software might have got us close enough to
survive, but it was a good call to go manual at that moment."
"Thanks. I don't know anybody else
who could have done that. But hey, look. We're within convenient walking
distance of the best living accommodation in about a hundred million
klicks."
Dior muttered something they didn't catch.
Leo spoke up, a little too loudly. "Too
right. Top class flying. And I'm sorry guys… "
"Enough said. All is well. That ranked pretty
high on the all-time Richter scale of stressful moments." That was Sable:
magnanimous in victory.
--------------- + + + --------------
Taking the first steps on Mars was not the first item on
their agenda. All six of the crew were fully employed for more than two hours
in post-landing checks, reporting to Hawthorne and making a remote inventory of
the two main units that had been landed twenty-six months before. Then Sable
acquiesced to Hawthorne's instruction to get some rest and food before they
ventured outside.
"It's true," he said, "since that cruel alarm
clock went off on the B450 we've been on the go for over forty hours with no
real break. So let's dim the lights, relax, turn off the cameras and get some
more use out of those excellent couches." They had removed their helmets,
but not their suits. The Dragon's interior was far too cramped to allow them to
do the latter.
As they moved around the cabin in the gravity of Mars,
one-third that of Earth, they kept colliding with each other or knocking into the walls. It was
easy to start an upwards movement against gravity, and it took concentration to
slow down and coordinate. They had eventually adjusted to weightlessness back
in the B450, but this was different. A few chuckles resulted. Finally they
dimmed the lights, lay down and tried to sleep.
They had agreed to select the first three Mars-walkers
randomly, upon their arrival. So it was that Ju Leung (usually known by her
anglicised name, July), Arnon Sable and Hung Song (also known as Hugo) were the
first party to set foot on the dust and rocks of Mars, on the plains of Arcadia
Planitia. Nobody whooped or groaned when the selection was revealed; Julia, Leo
and Dior grinned at the others and a few high-fives and handshakes were shared.
Sable insisted that July be the first, not him. He muttered,
"Y'know, a little poke in the eye of the old-white-men establishment
types. The first man on Mars is a woman." But Hugo managed to talk himself
into third place.
First, all six put on their helmets and checked each others'
seals. July found her hands wouldn't do their jobs properly unless she slowed
down and concentrated. She calmed her excited breathing. Then Leo pumped the
air of the cabin away and Hugo unlocked and unlatched the small side hatch.
Through it the dust and rock of the surface was visible a few metres below, at the foot of the tall Dragon. It was a dark
brown-grey rock, showing signs of fracturing and erosion. "So far Mars
basalt looks quite ordinary," July remarked. "This could be almost
any rocky desert back on Earth. Similar processes of vulcanism formed both worlds."
July was aware that she was also expected to narrate the action to
the watching billions back on Earth, and she kept up a low, terse commentary.
She kept calm by concentrating on the science and the prescribed exit routine.
She climbed slowly through the hatch, backwards, onto the extended ladder. "Because of our excellent training routine, it feels like I've done this dozens of times over," she said. "Déjà vu. Like a recurring dream, come true at last. Feels like the whole Earth is watching and
listening. I hope the exterior camera is on – oh, it is.
Here we go…"
July stepped down the rungs easily and found her feet on solid ground. She
could feel the gravel-like fragments grating under her boot. "I'm
down," she said, and turned around. Flexing her feet, she felt that she could float away with ease in the gravity one-third that of Earth's. They had all been instructed and
drilled in how to be the first person on Mars. Simple steps, take it slow, remark on the
obvious, speak with a view on making history. I haven't had much practice at
that! -someone had commented. But making history was what July had been
brought up to do, in a way. She wished with a bitter-sweet pang that her
grandmother Song Liu could have lived to see this day, instead of perishing
back in the old country.
She was looking at the panorama, with the sun up to the
left. So – facing south. Just as expected, the sun was a little dimmer
than she was used to but quite sufficient to see by. The fine dust suspended in
the atmosphere made the sky a delicate grey tinged with the slightest orange. They
had landed on the central plains of Arcadia Planitia, and distance stretched
all around her. Ah – the ancient lava flows. This is what it looks like.
The site was at around 171 degrees west, 36 north. They had spent so long studying
this area in satellite photos.
To the east the land graduated upwards in wide, finger-thick
shelves of tawny basalt, while to the west it stretched flat and smoothly to distant clumps of low hills. She knew that there were very few craters of any size nearby, except for the eroded ring near the line of hills. A few
rocks the size of fists or footballs, some pale, some black, strewed the ochre
sand. The light turned their shapes to mottled ovals. They've been sitting
there since ancient times, she guessed. A distant dune of dark sand, almost
coal-like but speckled with outcrops of basalt, drew her attention.
She hadn't spoken for what seemed like hours. "It's so
beautiful here. Magnificent. So still. Look at it! I know I can speak for the
whole crew when I say that we, too, come in peace for all humanity."
The moment passed. Had she said anything significant, any
thought that hadn't been spoken before? What would the people back home be
expecting – after all that many of them had strived for over long years? Ah –
"And we would never have got this far if it weren't for the many hard
workers and people with vision and determination who have contributed to this
mission. We thank you all." There – that sounded better, she
thought.
Sable stood behind her now, gazing around. Then Hugo was
climbing down the rungs. "It's great just to get out and stretch my
legs!" he said. "I got so stiff."
Someone cleared a throat over the suit channel: Sable.
"Me too. And I can't help thinking in terms of some final scene in a
movie, like the end of some great action climax, and someone says: This is just
the beginning. It feels just like that." Everyone murmured their
agreement with the sentiment.
Leo said, "Cue the sequel. Yeah, they'll be making
movies of this day for a long time yet."
Leo's tone made July uneasy. He sounded slightly unnatural
or tense, or grim, when he should have sounded relieved, glad to be landed at
last. We're all shaken up into unaccustomed shapes, she thought. He was
an odd choice for the position of Base Security Officer. Just as well we
don't need one – yet.
Julia took up Leo's remark, with a teasing grin in her
voice. "And who's gonna want to play you, Leo?"
"Whaddya mean? They'll be lining up around the block
to play my part. All of us."
In a quietly ironic tone, Sable said, "That kind of
thing all depends on what we all do next."
Then everyone was quiet for a while and got on with their
assigned tasks. Only July kept up a low monologue of her observations: the dark
streaks up Smaug's sides from the braking maneuver; appreciation of the
mainly flat terrain that made it so easy to land safely; the signs of ancient water
run-off; the sedimentary rocks; the certainty of finding more water-ice not far
beneath the surface, since the ISRU unit bored only 80 centimetres down and
struck a thin layer of ice mixed with sediment.
Sable made a prepared speech to the camera, reviewing their
landing and what they needed to do to establish a base. Julia steered an
external camera at the other landers, visible in the near distance. It was easy
walking distance.
They watched as Hugo executed a few cautious standing jumps.
He seemed to float briefly in the air, his feet rising a metre or so. Sable
then tried out a Mars-walking technique which they had theorised about
endlessly back on Earth. He skipped along in strides about twice as long as would be normal on Earth, rising fairly high at the top of the lope. His
boots scrabbled for grip at each big step. "It's not easy to get enough
friction, because we're much lighter now. But you have to look ahead and dodge
around the ever-present Mars rocks," he said, a little breathlessly –
as he stumbled slightly upon landing. "That wouldn't look too good as a
headline for our first half-hour on the surface of a new planet: mission
commander sprains ankle while out for a stroll." He continued more
carefully in a circle about the Dragon, then returned to the lander. Surveying
the Dragon's exterior, he too pointed out the scorch marks from aerobraking.
"More than I expected," he said. "We really did come
racing in. But Smaug did us proud."
July, who had stepped away from the lander some distance,
remarked, "The Dragon looks so small from out here." The
instant rejoinder was: "It is so small!" That was Leo.
He corrected himself: "Uh – it's a marvel of compact engineering."
July placed a small science experiment on the ground fifty
metres from Smaug. It was a radiation detector produced by a high school
in Boise, Idaho. That was a reminder to her that this place wasn't so
hospitable. It was a harsh environment and they needed to build a base that would
shelter them from the solar flux and galactic rays. Still, the challenge
enervated her. They could do it. Hugo, meanwhile, took readings of ambient
temperature, air pressure and humidity with one of the handheld data loggers
they'd brought. "And today's weather here at Homebase, Arcadia, looks
like 12 Celsius below, dusty skies all day and zero percent chance of
precipitation. Good day for a barbecue." He got a few chuckles for
that.
"Homebase? Man, that would be a great name, Hugo.
You get my vote." Leo sounded less tense now, July noticed.
"Well… it sounds like a baseballing term, Leo,"
said Sable, "and therefore a North Americanism. Could we try for
something more … I dunno … multi-cultural?" July heard the grin in his
voice.
"Huh? Five of the crew are American citizens. Two of
us were actually born in the USA, man. What's the harm?"
So that started a debate in which all six of the crew
contributed. It swung between light-hearted, ridiculous and heated. July
favoured the idea of a name that would mark a new beginning – an invented name,
if you like, or one not strongly linked to any Earth culture. Finally Sable
said to them all, "All those ideas sound fine to me. Let's vote on it
tomorrow."
Dior checked the ISRU and Habitat units remotely – all
storage tanks were 'nominal'. There was clearly enough air, water and power to
support them for weeks, and more could be produced continuously. She reported
that the Sabatier reaction vessels could probably use a servicing soon, after
nearly two years of continuous operation. It began to sink in that they were
here for the long haul.
Sable brought July and Hugo back to the Dragon's hatch.
"OK, I suggest our first task after completing all post-landing checks
will be to walk over to the Hab and get everything ship-shape. Away team to
swap with the Home team for fifteen minutes first. Come on out, folks, and have
a look around."
It was hard to believe, July thought as she stood waiting
for Leo to climb through the hatch. They were already getting themselves into a
routine and settling in. A fierce joy began to swell up. First steps towards
what this is really all about! They could be free, truly free: free of
control.
Julia notified them that someone high up on the investors'
board was about to address them all the way from Hawthorne, California. That
seemed so impossibly distant to July that she didn’t react until Sable asked
them all to line up in view of one of the external cameras. The investors, and
the party bureaucrats too, the ones she had escaped from, the closest she and
her kind had to enemies. She already felt like a Martian, someone of a
different race who had left behind all of that other planet's strange
obsessions.
Now this was her home.
+ + +
Emerson Devries was beginning to prepare for the end of his
shift as Mission Director. This had been his longest shift yet, and the best.
The landing was officially complete, and when he handed over to Fiona Haller
she would be directing the Hawthorne team into helping the Smaug's crew to
set up mankind's first base on another planet. He kept thinking he had absorbed
the immense historic nature of what they were doing, but again he was overcome
with a jubilant awe for a moment.
He passed behind the rear desks where the new Flight and
CapCom were seated. "Ben, Kaya, welcome back. I will be stepping out in
about five, so I want you to check over your briefs and test your comms. Any
concerns, I mean any at all, I want you to talk to Fiona. Ben, there's not so
much for you to do now except analyse the landing data. I'd like a summary of
your findings by this time tomorrow, please. Any questions?" They grinned
and shook their heads, both highly focussed individuals, like happy fish in
deep waters.
He chuckled suddenly, feeling the release of the end of his
shift approaching. "You're much too young to be doing this," he said.
"Heck, I'm only thirty-two. But I wouldn't swap you for all the shark fins
in Japan."
Kaya's grin dwindled and she looked like she was listening
to a signal in her earphones. "Sir, I'm not getting a carrier from the Smaug.
I'm sure there was still voice traffic when I sat down a minute ago." She
pulled the computer keyboard toward her and began an intense interrogation of
the communications system.
Devries walked over to Markus Nasution, the Mars
communications chief. "Markus, what do you have for us? Kaya's not getting
a carrier from the lander."
Nasution already looked grim as he glanced around. "I
know. I'm working that issue right now. Still got telemetry from the Hab and
the ISRU. Smaug cut off just a few seconds ago. The crew hasn't
established voice comms from the base yet."
Devries felt sweat agitating on his palms and forehead.
"Where are they now? Can we get a fix on each of them?" Nasution
shrugged and threw a meaningful glance at the main screen. The Hab camera that
was meant to be tracking the crew's walk across from the lander showed the wide
open landscape with the Smaug planted like a pointed mushroom in the
distance. Devries swung around to Kaya and repeated the question. She was meant
to be the crew's constant companion.
She looked up for a moment. "Uh – they got
to the Hab a few minutes ago. About ten. I saw them on screen. They were late checking in with the Hab comms
channel. I don't get it."
He could see the growing panic on her face, and on Ben's,
and felt a churning in his gut. "OK, so Kaya, Markus, let's cut this
apart. You all know the comms system like your own back yard. Find the fault.
Find a work-around." He marvelled at how level his voice remained.
Kelly, the bright young Irish woman overseeing the new base
equipment, waved for his attention. "Sir, right now the ISRU and Hab
telemetry cut off. Just like that."
Devries hurried back to Kaya. He didn't even want to hear
what Kelly had to say. Walk, idiot, don't run! "Kaya, replay for me
the last minute or two of comms traffic. I want to hear what they were talking
about." He threw a look back at Kelly. "Get me all you can on
that," he called, feeling slightly more helpless than he had before.
Kaya got busy, and Devries plugged in his earbuds to her
console. "Here it is," she said. "They were just into the Hab,
I'm pretty sure. It's Julia."
-at this! No dust, no condensation.
- I'll check the gas monitors and pumps. That was
Hugo.
There was a pause, filled only with crackles and the odd
grunt or unclear monosyllable.
- Alright, Control, we're setting up in here. Dior's
voice. The Boss and Leo are over in the ISRU, running through the
checklists. The walk over was great. Thanks for picking us a flat place to live.
Driving, travelling, will be easy.
Then another silence. Devries exchanged glances with Kaya
and Ben, who were listening in too. Kaya nodded. "Then there's some
garbled –" Devries raised a hand to cut her off: voices again, several at
once. One of them was Leo, but too low and fast to catch words.
- What did he say? That was on Hugo's channel, but
several other voices were talking at once. He sounded curious, not concerned.
July made a reply, a few words, but it was lost beneath
Julia's description of the Hab's interior.
Hugo talked about their daily routine. He was obviously
working on something, the way his breathing carried through his speech. Dior
chipped in with a few comments. Julia was attempting to connect up the camera
system so that they could transmit video, but was having trouble twisting the
connectors on with her gloved hands. So she began taking off her outer gloves.
Devries turned to Kaya. "So all this was relayed over
to the lander and through the uplink?"
"Yup."
"And did we hear anything at all from Leo and
Arnon?"
"Not since about halfway across from Smaug, and
a few words as they cycled into the ISRU. And whatever Leo just said. I think
we can separate it out."
There was very little more to hear. There was just the four
of them in the Hab, talking on for a while, then a sudden snap, and silence.
There was no obvious sounds of alert.
The big screens were all blank now, except for the telemetry
from the B450 as it swung around Mars on its eventual way home, and the latest
orbital photo from the Mars Orbiter: Acheron Fossae, perhaps.
This was going downhill much too fast.
Devries walked to the front, took a deep breath and
addressed his team. "So, everybody, as you can see we have a situation. We
have lost voice and telemetry from the lander and the pre-land units. But let's
stick with what we know. All six of them were fine, there was no sign of alarm
or injury. There's nothing consistent with a depressurisation event, no
evidence of medical emergency, nothing at all catastrophic, up until the LOS.
"My first guess would be equipment failure. But let's
not guess. Let's comb through the data, right down to the ones and zeroes, let's
talk to the team who have the duplicate units in the other room. They're going
to simulate every failure mode, and I want you to work along with them. Let's get
that signal back up. I have every confidence in you." He tried not to
glance at the VIP room at the back, but he could see Dosanski with his nose
apparently glued to the glass. "I'm meant to hand off to Fiona about now,
but I'll delay that in order to get her up to speed and give some input. I'll be
close by. Let's get to work."
+ + +
Much later, four hours later, Devries pushed open a fire
door that let onto the employees' rear parking lot. Outside, he discovered
distractedly, it was night, and the sky was split between thin cloud and a few faint
stars. Los Angeles didn't allow much of the cosmos to intrude upon its intense
existence. Briefly he envied the Mars explorers their glorious night skies.
He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment.
Sleep swirled around him, wanting to sweep him into its embrace.
The fire door popped open again and he turned to see Yuanna,
the Mars Society PR, emerge. She swung her car keys from one hand and a small
backpack from the other. She stopped, surprised, upon seeing him. Her face was
drawn.
"Escaping from the madness at last?" he quipped.
"Yeah, just a breather. Mr Dosanski left for his hotel
half an hour ago. My friend's just down the road off Segundo. She said I could
crash for a bit. Then I'm back into the fray." Her blended
African-European features brightened. "How's it going, really?"
He tilted his head. "Oh, you know. There's always hope."
"That bad, huh?" She lingered as he hesitated,
perhaps wanting to hear some inside secrets.
"Yup, that bad," he muttered. "We have no
sign of any plausible technical failure mode that would account for this. We watched this exact design land on Mars twice already, under its own control. Wasn't that enough? We
have people looking into the human angles, as weird as that sounds. Also hoping
to snap a photo from orbit of the landing site at their next sunrise."
Devries shook his head and gazed up at the few stars that could penetrate the
city's light pollution. "They're so distant. What can we do from sixty
million miles away?"
Yuanna swallowed, her
eyes widening slightly at his candour. "Well, all the best. You and your
team will crack it, I'm sure." And with that, she was off towards her car.
Onwards to Kayaks And Cosmonauts
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