Red Thunder (44 page)

"No alarm," Dak whispered. He was right. No bells clanged, no recording of Kelly told us
This is not a drill!
How could that be?

"No pressure breach," I said, scanning my boards for an indication
of the problem. All my lights were green. So were everybody else's...
then Dak noticed his signal-strength indicators for the various
channels he had been picking up from Earth. All the meters were zeroed.

"The antenna," Alicia guessed.

"We lost the antenna," Travis called out from above us. "Has to be. I'm unbuckling now, take a look... yes, it's gone."

"What did it hit?" I asked.

"It hit a strut," Travis said. "Manny, I just flipped a coin and
you're it. Come to the bridge, you are acting pilot for a while."

I unbuckled, my queasiness returning, and floated up to the bridge.
Travis was out of his command chair, leaning close to a side window for
a look at the strut.

"I don't see any damage from up here," he said, "but I'll have to go
out and take a look." He lowered his voice, without actually
whispering. "If something happens to me, you are in charge. What will
you do?"

Throw up, crap in my pants, and have a nervous breakdown, not
necessarily in that order, I thought. But I said, "Kill our velocity."

"That's locked into the computer," he said. "Just do what we'd
already planned to do. That will bring you to a stop about a hundred
thousand miles from Mars."

"Plot a course back to Earth," I said.

"Never hurry,"
Travis said. "Take your time. You'll have
plenty of time. The tutorials for the navigation program are good. But
before you do that, while your speed is low, send somebody out, Kelly
or Alicia, to check the strut if I haven't been able to get a report
back to you. You and Dak, you aren't rated for free-falling suit work
until you've put in eight hours weightless without throwing up. Sorry,
that's the way it has to be. You can
not
throw up in a suit. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Go on."

"Reduce speed to a few hundred miles per hour, relative to the
Earth... enter the atmosphere tail first, engines firing... and burn up
in the atmosphere, most likely."

"A negative attitude's not going to help you. If Kelly or Alicia
reports the strut is damaged, land in the ocean. She should float."

"Blow the emergency hatch, deploy the rubber raft, and get the hell
out of here," I said. The emergency hatch was the top of Module One. It
was held on with explosive bolts. A standard airline inflatable raft
would deploy automatically when the bolts were blown, and it would be
up to us to abandon the sinking ship.

"You might consider a water landing even if the strut's okay, if you don't have confidence about easing her down on land."

"I don't have that confidence."

"Do what you have to do. Anyway, this is all just standard
procedure, this briefing, you know that. I'll be back here in twenty
minutes." He grinned.

Alicia poked her head through the hatch.

"Travis, we've been talking, we figure me or Kelly ought to go out
and check the strut. You're the captain, you shouldn't leave the ship."

Travis sighed.

"There's wisdom in what you say. But the suits and the lock haven't
been tested, and as captain I won't send any of you out in them at this
point. I have more suit time than the rest of you put together. End of
discussion."

Alicia looked like she was going to say something else, but
remembered what she had agreed to. Dak joined her, and he had a
suspicious look.

"How do you flip a coin in free fall, Captain?"

Travis took a quarter from his pocket and set it spinning in the
air. We all watched it for a moment, then Travis clapped his hands
together, trapping the coin. He moved his hands apart and the coin
floated there, the "heads" side facing him.

I WATCHED ON a TV screen as Dak and Alicia helped
Travis into his suit. I was glad we'd practiced it. When we began it
had taken us the better part of an hour to get into one. After a lot of
drilling, we could do it in ten minutes, with another five for systems
check. Travis did even better, naturally. Kelly joined me on the bridge
and we watched through more cameras as Travis entered the lock and
cycled it. I saw the pressure gauge drop to zero, then the door opened.

We switched back and forth between a rear-looking stationary camera
and the one mounted on Travis's helmet. Travis handled himself well,
securing his safety line, then swinging out and over the strut, where
he commenced his inspection. Pretty soon he located the impact area.

"That dish is headed for the stars, at about three million miles an
hour," Travis said over the radio. "How long before it gets to Alpha
Centauri?"

"Is this question going to be on the final exam?" I asked.

"Extra credit."

"A thousand years," Kelly said, and when I looked at her, she shrugged. "Just a guess," she whispered to me.

"Did you give her the answer, Manny?" Travis said with a laugh.

I hadn't even figured it out myself. But light travels 186,000 miles
per second, which would be... eleven million and some miles per minute,
670 million miles per hour, a light-year was 5.8 trillion miles, Alpha
Centauri was about four and a half light-years away... the answer I
kept getting was 1,004 years. How about that?

"Trick question," Travis said. "The answer is, never. We're not aimed at Alpha Centauri."

Travis moved along the strut quickly. I had another episode of the
dry heaves before he got to the most critical area, the welds
connecting the strut to the thrust cradle, and from there to the rest
of the ship.

It was half an hour before Travis pronounced it good. Another twenty
minutes to get inside and up to the cockpit. Five more minutes before
he was satisfied we were ready to apply thrust again. And just a bit
over an hour after the emergency began, that blessed, blessed thrust
settled down on my abused stomach again. I felt like I'd gone ten
rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world.

Travis got the ship stabilized on her new thrust vector, and then joined us in the common room.

"Aren't we going to miss Mars now?" Alicia asked. "I mean, we
traveled more than three million miles while you were outside, if I
understand right."

"You understand right. If I stuck to our original flight times we'd
go way past Mars and have to come back. But I can compensate by
applying just a bit more thrust. I haven't figured exactly what that
thrust should be—that's one of the nice things about
Red Thunder,
she's very forgiving, you basically just have to aim at where you're
going and blast, not calculate complicated orbits. If you go too far,
you can just thrust your way back. But it'll be about one point oh
three or maybe one point oh five gees from here to Mars, to bring us
stationary a thousand or so miles above the atmosphere. You won't even
feel it. In fact, it's one point oh five now. Do you feel heavy?"

I did, a little, now that he mentioned it, but it was only a few
pounds, and that heavy feel could be just my abused stomach bitching at
me.

It wasn't until then I had time to think about the consequences of
what had befallen us with the antenna. We couldn't transmit or receive
signals from the Earth anymore. We were out of contact, and would stay
that way.

Suddenly outer space felt pretty lonely.

I TAKE BACK everything I said about the lack of a view aboard
Red Thunder.
When we arrived at Mars, Travis inserted us neatly into a close orbit, and Mars in all his glory filled half the sky.

The Red Planet was not as red as I'd expected. There were infinite
shades of rust, then large areas of lighter-colored sand, vast deserts
and deep valleys, volcanic mountains that cast a long shadow if they
were on the day/night terminator.

If only I felt well enough to truly appreciate it.

We all floated in the cockpit, getting the best view we would have
on the entire trip, and my mouth kept filling up with spit. Then I'd
try to swallow, and my stomach didn't like that idea at all. I'd gag,
and try to throw up again. I think Kelly, Alicia, and Travis were
starting to find Dak and me pretty disgusting. The bastards.

We could have simply eased into the atmosphere without any orbiting at all,
Red Thunder
was capable of that, but the site Travis wanted to land on was on the
other side of Mars when we got there, so we "parked" for an hour.

"Noctus Labyrinthus?" Dak asked. "I thought—"

"Elysium Planitia, what I told everybody during our last news
conference," Travis said, with a grin. "A nice, flat plain where
there's very little of real interest. An excellent choice to make a
nice, safe, sane touchdown. But we ain't going there."

"Why not?" Kelly asked.

"Because it's boring, and because that's what I wanted the Chinese
to hear. My children, the two greatest tourist attractions on Mars are
Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris. The first is the largest volcano in
the entire solar system. Almost seventy thousand feet higher than the
surrounding ground. Compare that to Mauna Loa, Earth's biggest volcano,
which is twenty-nine thousand feet above the ocean floor.

"Valles Marineris is the Grand Canyon of Mars, and it would stretch
almost from New York to Los Angeles on Earth, four miles deep and four
hundred miles across in some places. Either one would be a wonderful
place to land."

"Then why the valley?" Alicia asked.

"Two big reasons. We're pretty sure we understand the forces behind
Olympus Mons. There's no shifting of the crust on Mars, no
continent-sized plates moving along fault lines. Volcanoes form because
there's an upwelling of magma in the mantle. On Earth, the plates move
over that hot spot, which is how Hawaii formed, a series of newer
volcanoes popping every few million years as the plate slid over the
hot spot.

"On Mars, the crust just sits there, and Olympus Mons just grows, and grows, and grows, over billions of years."

"Sounds great," I said. "Why don't we go there?"

"Because Valles Marineris is more likely to contain the answer to
the most important question about Mars. Is there any water still there?
The valley looks like it could have been formed by running water. But
how long ago? Is any still left, frozen in the ground like permafrost
in the tundra? The canyon's an obvious place to look." Then he smiled a
little broader. "Besides, it's where the Chinese will land."

He called up a map of Mars on his screen. He jabbed his finger at a point just above the north rim of the Valles.

"Longitude ninety-five degrees, six degrees south latitude. I'll be
able to eyeball the correct landing site, because we'll be able to see
the Chinese pathfinders."

It was the successful landing of two out of the three "pathfinder"
ships on Mars that had finally lit a match under the complacent butts
of those in charge of America's manned space program. One of the ships
had failed to respond to commands from Earth and zipped on past Mars
and into oblivion. But the other two had landed within half a mile of
each other.

"The Chinese
have
to land there, they've got no choice. So
I will come down at the landing site they announced to the world. I'll
find the supply ships and put down within a couple miles of them. And
then... then, my friends, we've got them.

"We're going to hijack the Chinese mission."

And he explained his plan to force the Chinese to acknowledge our
presence on Mars... and soon we were all grinning with him. It sounded
foolproof to me.

Providing, of course, that we didn't kill ourselves during
our
landing.

TRAVIS FIRED A long burst to slow us out of Mars
orbit, then we were weightless again for what felt like three hours but
really wasn't nearly so long.

Once again the four of us were strapped to our chairs in the
windowless control deck. There was a cruciform cursor superposed on our
aft-looking cameras, the ones that would be giving Travis his only
useful view of where he was going. The cursor was right on the knife
edge of the western reaches of the Valles Marineris. Of course we were
also using our radar to judge altitude, but radar was one of the weak
points of
Red Thunder.
To keep our costs under one
million—okay, in the final accounting we had spent more like
$1,150,000 of Travis's and Kelly's money—the great majority of
the ship was built with parts purchased off the shelf, from the tanks
the ship was made out of, right down to our pressurized ball point
pens, an item NASA had once spent almost three million dollars to
develop. But good civilian radar equipment that would meet our needs
was hard to come by. We wanted to be able to bounce signals off Mars
and the Earth while still hundreds or thousands of miles away, and
would need even more range if we had to find a crippled and lost
Ares Seven.

Our radar equipment had been scavenged from an Air Force airplane
graveyard, from the nose of an old fighter plane. It was the best we
could do.

It seemed to be functioning well as we descended, the numbers
flickering down rapidly on my screen. Ten miles. Nine miles. Eight
miles. More and more detail appearing on the screen. I made myself
relax, breathing steadily. Not for the first time on this trip, I
wondered if I was really cut out to be a spaceman. My stomach was
protesting all the changes in gravity as Travis nursed the big, awkward
contraption down to her destiny on the Red Planet.

Three miles. Two miles.

The terrain undulated gently in a washboard pattern created by the
dust storms that periodically swept Mars from pole to pole, and could
last months. If one had been happening when we arrived we would have
been out of luck, orbiting for no more than a week before we'd be
forced to go home. But the air was clear as glass.