Red Thunder (48 page)

"Well, heck," Dak said. "Let's just lower him down and let him chip some off."

When Li understood that
Blue Thunder
was equipped with a
powered winch and a thousand meters of heavy-duty poly rope, I thought
he would hurt himself dancing around. Travis was dubious, but I think
he was interested in helping the Chinese regain some lost face, so he
agreed.

We secured Li to the rope and he went over the side, walking
backward. In fifteen minutes he was down. He chipped for a while, and
then our radios were filled with his excited chatter. Xu smiled hugely
at us.

"He has found ice!" he said. "Just where he expected to find it."

So, in the end, the crew of
Red Thunder
did get to do its
little bit of discovery. Short of finding actual Martian life, it was
as exciting a result as anyone could ask for.

WHEN WE GOT back, Kelly was in tears. I just held her for a while, until she could stop shaking and get herself back together.

"I feel so dumb," she said. "Acting like I'm six years old or something."

"That's just how I felt," Alicia said.

"With me, it was more depression," I said.

"Why didn't you call us on the radio?" Travis asked her. "We'd have come back and got you, made some other arrangement."

"That's why. You would have come back. I kept telling myself I'd be
okay, then I'd start shivering again. Couldn't stop." She blew her
nose. "I almost decided to come looking for y'all. Follow the tire
tracks."

"That's crazy, Kelly," Travis said, not unkindly.

"That's what I'm telling you, Travis. I was out of my mind. I've never been so scared in my whole life."

Travis told us that, starting tomorrow, we'd operate on the buddy
system all the time. No one would be left alone. Since he was adamant
about having someone aboard ship at all times, that meant that only
three of us at a time could go exploring.

"What the heck," Dak said. "I'll take my turn, too. Any of y'all can drive
Blue Thunder
... well, about half as good as me, and since I'm twice the driver I need to be, that ought to be all right."

Alicia hit him with an apple core.

IT WASN'T UNTIL the next morning, Day M5, that we realized Travis hadn't meant to include himself in the buddy system rotation.

"I can handle it, don't worry about me," he said.

Debate was allowed aboard
Red Thunder
until Travis cut it
off. So we were still arguing about it when somebody knocked on the
door. Whoever it was must have been pounding on the side of the ship
with a wrench or something.

"I wonder who that could be?" Kelly asked.

"Marvin the Martian?" I suggested.

It was still half an hour until the Chinese were due to join us for
another day of exploration. Travis frowned and looked at his watch.
Alicia tapped a few keys on her board and we saw a view from one of our
outside cameras. There was a single Chinese standing on our threshold
platform. We could see the Chinese rover parked a few feet from the
ramp, and no one else was in it.

"Who's that knocking at our door?" Dak asked.

"Captain Xu, Mr. Sinclair. Captain, may I come in? This is an emergency."

We all looked at each other, then Travis shrugged and made his way
down to the air lock. We heard it cycle, then voices too indistinct to
hear. Travis shouted, "No!" and the rest of us scrambled for the ladder.

"It happened about eight hours ago," Xu was saying. Travis looked at us.

"Xu says the
Ares Seven
blew up."

Though the news was not entirely unexpected, it was still shocking to hear it.

"Apparently the crew had some warning," Xu went on. "They declared
an emergency and within two minutes telemetry ceased. But Ms. Oakley
had indicated that at least three of the cosmonauts were still alive."

"Holly's alive," Travis breathed.

"Well... that no longer seems likely."

"Likely or not, we're going after them," Travis said.

This time it was Xu's turn to be shocked.
Red Thunder
could
fool longtime astronauts that way, at first. It could take them a while
to realize, on a gut level, just how much Jubal's baby had changed all
the rules of space travel.

"Yes... yes, of course. If there is anything, that is, if I can help in—"

"Do you have any kind of maneuvering unit, a suit jet or a
low-powered rocket unit we could use for an EVA if we can find—"

"Pardon me... what is this EVA?"

"Extra-Vehicular Activity—one of those NASA jawbreakers, this one means stepping outside the ship for a bit."

"Yes, we have such a device, and I would be happy to give you one."

"Can we go get it? Now? Time is critical."

"Certainly."

"Crew, I hope to lift from here in no more than one hour. Batten
down all the hatches, secure everything, you know the drill. Captain
Xu, let's go."

"I can get
Blue Thunder
stowed away in about an hour,
Cap..." Dak saw the sad look on Travis's face, and the air went out of
him. "Sorry, Captain, I wasn't thinking. I just hate to abandon her.
Captain Xu, you're welcome to use her when we've left."

"Drive it about half a mile away and leave the keys in it, Dak,"
Travis said. He was kidding about the keys. "We'll come back in a few
months and pick her up."

Dak brightened at that thought, and joined Travis and Xu on the way to the lock.

DAK CAME BACK in a foul mood.

"One of the electric blanket connections was loose," he said. "One
of the tires turned into black confetti. She's not going to be any use
to Captain Xu or anybody else, and I didn't bring a spare." He kicked a
chair in his frustration.

Travis and Xu came back with the space propulsion device.

"Somebody at NASA or some branch of government figured out we were the only possible hope for the
Ares Seven
,"
he said. "So they sent the last telemetry from the ship to Captain Xu.
It'll give me a pretty good idea where to look for them." He held up a
silvery DVD. "Thanks, Captain."

"I was glad to help. But I must mention another problem." It took
him a while to get going, and I could only imagine how much this was
costing him in face.

"Comrade Chun has... has suffered a mental breakdown. We received
orders not to pass this information on to you. I felt the origin of the
orders was dubious, not through the proper chain of command of the
space agency. Chun ordered me to... to destroy your ship, or disable it
in some way. He became violent, and had to be restrained."

He looked down at his feet for a long time, and none of us said
anything. Destroy our ship? Had they brought explosives along? Then I
remembered that part of that day's agenda was to set off charges and
study the seismic vibrations, like wildcatters did when searching for
oil.
Red Thunder
was tough, probably tougher than those
Chinese murderers back in Beijing realized, but like any ship there
were vulnerable places, and it wouldn't take much of a charge to weaken
or destroy them. That son of a bitch!

"We face a very long sojourn here on Mars," Xu finally went on. "I
was wondering if it was at all possible... to... for you to carry
Comrade Chun back with you and hand him over to the authorities, or to
your Chinese embassy. I... I don't know how we are going to guard him
and restrain him during all that time. And since you will be back on
Earth in just a few days..." He seemed unable to go on.

Travis put his hand on Xu's shoulder, looked into his eyes, and shook his head.

"Can't do it, friend. I'm not going to have my people guard him twenty-four hours a day, no matter how short the trip is."

"Yes, of course. I'm sure I'd feel the same way. Then, failing
that... do you have anything aboard ship that would be helpful in
restraining him? It appears that we left Earth without a single pair of
handcuffs." His small smile was ironic.

"That, we can do. Though we somehow forgot the handcuffs, too."

We gave him half a dozen rolls of duct tape and a spare coil of poly
rope. They hadn't brought any duct tape, believe it or not. One good
rule for living, in my opinion, is to never go beyond the city limits
of your hometown without a roll of duct tape in the trunk and a Swiss
Army knife in the glove box.

"I don't think you'll have to sweat out the whole time here,
though," Travis said. "Plenty of others ought to show up in the coming
months. Hell, I'll come back and get you myself if no one else will."
He paused a moment. "I don't know how much hot water you're going to be
in over this business, Captain Xu, but if I come get you, I'll take you
back to wherever you want to go on Earth. You know what I'm saying?
Anywhere."

Xu smiled. "I understand perfectly, and thank you. Unfortunately, I
have a very large family, many relatives, and could not go abroad
without them. And, I must say, I love my country, though not always
those who govern it."

"Well said. I've enjoyed knowing you. Give my love to Mei-Ling and Dr. Li."

We all seconded that, and shook his hand.

Fifteen minutes later, just long enough for Xu to get out of the way, we raised ship for an unknown destination.

WE BOOSTED FOR about four hours. Turnaround—and,
hallelujah!
I didn't feel half bad—then boost again for another four hours. Then weightlessness.

Dak was still sick. I wasn't tempted to giggle, not even for a second.

I don't know how to describe the problem Travis had to solve for us to have any hope of finding the
Ares Seven.

Up until she blew, she was continuously sending back information as
to her position, and we had the last seconds of that. She had slowed
down below solar escape velocity so, undisturbed, she would swing way,
way out into the cometary zone and return to the inner solar system in
about a thousand years.

But the explosion itself would certainly have provided enough energy
to alter her course. All Travis could do was to try to bring
Red Thunder
to rest in the area where she should be if we extended her orbital parameters from the time of the explosion.

We had good orbital mechanics software. We had middling-to-poor
navigation optics to tell us our precise position. We had good data
from Earth. We had poor-to-bad radar for the final stage of the
intercept. Good news, bad news, good news, bad news.

But in the good news column I would put the fact that Travis
Broussard had proved himself to be the best seat-of-the-pants spaceship
pilot in the history of man in space. If anyone could get us there, if
anyone could find that ship, I was betting on Travis.

He brought us to what seemed the most likely area and velocity. We
set up, and we waited, like a traffic cop waiting for a speeder to come
by. But we couldn't wait for too long, the situation was too dynamic.

Casting around for a sighting involved a lot of starting and
stopping. As time wore on Travis grew less gentle with us, going from
weightlessness to three gees, the maximum Travis felt he dared subject
Red Thunder
to. It got to where I was looking forward to free fall, at least it
afforded ten minutes of stability. Dak was still very sick, trying to
ignore it, and even Kelly started to look a little green.

We did this for two hours. Travis seemed ready to go on with it
until hell froze over or we ran out of gas. The rest of us grew
increasingly discouraged. We realized Travis was, too, when he started
shouting down to us, asking if we saw anything, when he had to know
that if we did we'd shout it out instantly.

Normally I was in charge of the radar. I still was, but we had the
radar display up on all four of our screens. What else was there to do?
We stared at our screens until our eyes hurt, and saw nothing at all.

Then, on the thirteenth stop, just as Travis was about to boost
again, I thought I caught a flicker on the edge of my screen, from the
corner of my eye. Could it have been the ship, or a piece of it,
drawing the shallowest possible chord through the spherical volume of
space we were searching?

"Did anybody else see that?" I asked.

"See what?" Travis bellowed from above.

"I thought there was a flicker," I said. "Nobody else saw it."

"Heading! Give me a heading!"

I gave it to him, and instantly the ship started turning to point to
it. Then three gees smashed into us again. Dak groaned, and couldn't
get the barf bag to his mouth with arms suddenly turned to lead, but it
didn't matter, he didn't have anything to bring up.

"I see it again!" I sang out. There it was, flickering... and another, and another.

"Four... no, five blips."

"I see seven," Alicia called out.

"It's the debris field," Travis shouted down to us. "Now we have to figure out which ones are worthless."

We wanted to find big chunks, but the biggest might not be the prize
we were looking for. It all depended on the size and shape of the
explosion, and where people were when it happened. The first three
objects we found turned out to be heavy parts of the engine.

"Stands to reason those would be thrown the farthest, right?" Travis
said. Nobody responded. "Well, anybody have any better theory?"

"Sounds good to me, Captain," I said. I was staring at a screen with
maybe a hundred twinkling blips, some of them flashing every second or
two, some waxing and waning over a period of minutes as they rotated.
Red Thunder
was drifting through the debris field. It was dangerous to go through
it any other way. Already we'd heard two loud clangs as fist-sized
hunks of stuff hit us.

After spotting and rejecting a few dozen objects Travis was getting
frustrated again. "Can anybody help me out here? Anybody got any ideas?
Crazy ideas, stupid ideas, out-of-left-field ideas... any idea at all.
I promise I won't laugh."