by Jerry
“When you put it like that,” Bridget said.
Steuby nodded. “Now let’s charge the batteries.”
The sun was all the way up by the time they found the solar array’s charging transfer board and ran cables all the way out to the rocket. Possibly it would have been quicker to pull the batteries and bring them to the charging station, but Steuby was nervous about disturbing anything on the rocket. There were charging ports built into the battery housing, and there was enough power cable lying around to reach Jupiter, so that was the most straightforward way. Still, it took a few hours, and both Bridget and Steuby stood around nervously watching the battery-charging readouts as the morning sky passed through its spooky blue dawn into its normal brownish-yellow.
“Good thing about solar arrays is they’re pretty low maintenance,” he said, to pass the time.
The charging indicators on the batteries lit up.
“Wonder how the NTO synthesizer is doing,” Bridget said. She looked up at the sky. They knew what time it was, but that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the position of Phobos, zipping around three times a day. They were practically in Apollo 13 territory. The plan was this: watch until Phobos was in more or less the right place, then touch off the rocket’s engines, and if they’d avoided fatal errors they would launch, achieve orbit, and then run out of fuel about when the freighter came along. The freighter’s schedule was always the same: wait until the moons passed by, dock with the elevator, split before the moons passed by again. Once the freighter had decoupled from the elevator terminus, it would fire an escape burn. It took about two hours to prep that burn. Bridget knew this because she had worked the Belt before deciding she liked to experience gravity once in a while. Even Martian gravity.
In this case the freighter wouldn’t be doing a drop. Instead it would be taking on people and supplies, but the time frame was more or less the same. Counting two hours in Phobos’ orbit from when it passed the elevator terminus put the little Number Nine Moon right on the western horizon. They had about an hour from then to fire their rocket so they could be at escape velocity when they got close to the freighter, which would probably make an emergency burn to save them, but maybe not. Everything would be much more certain if they could match the freighter’s velocity as closely as possible, which meant putting the rocket in a trans-Earth trajectory.
Problem was, if they did that and the freighter didn’t pick them up, they would die long before they got to Earth. The rocket, if it had any fuel left, would do an automated Earth-orbit injection burn and the Orbital Enforcement Patrol would board it to find their desiccated bodies. Steuby hoped he wouldn’t die doing something embarrassing.
Actually, he hoped he wouldn’t die at all. You had to remind yourself of that once in a while when you were in the middle of doing something that would probably kill you. You got so used to the idea that you were going to die, you started trying to make the best of it. It was a useful corrective to articulate the possibility that you might survive.
The day on Mars was forty minutes longer than the day on Earth. Phobos went around about every eight hours, rising in the west because it orbited so much faster than Mars rotated. They needed to get the rocket up to a little more than five kilometers per second for escape velocity. Steuby liked the way those numbers went together. Forty, eight, five. Factors. Of course they had nothing to do with each other, but given the chaos of recent events, Steuby was willing to take his symmetry where he could find it.
Waiting for the tank to fill again, he looked around at the abandoned settlement. HB seemed nice, more like a real place to live than just a colony outpost. There was even public art, a waist-high Mount Rushmore of Martian visionaries carved from reddish stone. Wells, Bradbury, Robinson, Zhao. Marco probably would have wanted to take it if he was still alive, and if they could have justified the weight.
“No can do,” he said out loud. “We’re fighting the math. Man, Marco, when I was a kid, you could get anything. Strawberries in January. We were on our way. Now we’re on our way back. Pulling back into our shell.”
“Stop talking to him,” Bridget said. “He’s dead.”
“Look.” He was crying and hoped it didn’t show in his voice. His helmet was so dusty she wouldn’t be able to see.
Then she wiped the dust away with her gloved hand and said, “Steuby. I get it. He was an old friend and you’re sad. Stop being an ass about it and stop trying to pretend you’re not doing it, because if you divide your attention you’re going to make a mistake and it will kill us. Okay?”
“Right,” he said. “Okay.”
He kept an eye on the NTO tank while Bridget did something to the monitors on the solar array, but he kept thinking: I’m millions of miles from Earth waiting for a robot left over from a failed Mars colony to finish refueling my rocket and hoping a dust storm doesn’t stop us from making a semi-legal rendezvous with a freighter coming back from the asteroid belt. How had he gotten into this situation?
Steuby was sixty-two years old, born in 2010, and had only ever seen one other person die in front of him. That was back on the Moon, where he’d worked for almost fifteen years. A guy named Walter Navarro, looking the wrong way when someone swung a steel beam around at a construction site. The end of the beam smashed the faceplate of Walter’s helmet. The thing Steuby remembered most about it was the way Walter’s screams turned into ice fog pouring out and drifting down onto the regolith. By the time they got him inside he was dead, with frozen blood in his eyes from where the shards of the faceplate had cut him. Steuby had gotten out of the construction business as soon as he’d collected his next paycheck. After that he’d run tourist excursions, and seen some weird shit, but nothing weirder than Walter Navarro’s dying breaths making him sparkle in the vacuum.
THEY FOUND A tractor that would run and hooked the tank carriage to it. The tractor’s engine whined at the load, but it pulled the tank as long as they kept it in low gear. The rocket’s fueling port was high on its flank, on the opposite side from the gantry that reached up to the passenger capsule in the nose. Ordinarily a crew would refuel it with a cherry-picker truck, but neither Steuby nor Bridget could find that particular vehicle in or near the garage and they didn’t have time to look anywhere else. So they had to tie two ladders together and lean them against the rocket. They flipped a coin to see who would climb, and Bridget lost. Steuby watched her go. “Hey, if you break your leg you’re gonna have a hell of a time getting in the rocket,” he said.
Bridget didn’t miss a beat. “Better shoot me and leave me, then. Like Marco.”
For some reason her tone of voice made Steuby think she was trying to make him feel bad.
“I didn’t shoot Marco,” he said defensively, even though he wasn’t sure what he was defending.
Once the nitrogen tetroxide was topped off, they had to go back and clean the tank out, then fill it with hydrazine. Together the compounds would fuel a rocket via a hypergolic reaction. One of Steuby’s favorite words, hypergolic. Like just being golic wasn’t enough. Neither chemical would do a thing by itself—well, other than poison and corrode anything they touched. Together, boom.
Usually transfers like this were done in clean rooms, by techs in clean suits. Steuby and Bridget were doing it in a dust-filled garage wearing worn-out spacesuits that probably had a dozen microscopic leaks each. He hoped they wouldn’t have to do any maneuvering in hard vacuum anytime soon.
When they cranked the fresh hose onto the nipple and locked it into place, Bridget and Steuby looked at each other. “Just so we’re clear,” Steuby said, “this will blow up and kill us both if there’s any trace of the tetro still in there.”
“Yup,” Bridget said.
“Okay then.” Steuby paused over the dial that would open the synthesizer and start dumping the MMH into the tank. “I’ll try not to talk to Marco anymore,” he said.
“That’s the least of my worries right now.”
“It’s just. . . this is
going to sound weird, but I talk to him even though he’s dead because if I talk to him, it’s like he’s not dead, which makes me think I might not die.”
“Turn the knob, Steuby,” she said.
“I don’t want to die.”
She put her gloved hand over his, which was still resting on the dial. “I know. Me neither. But let’s be honest. If we really wanted to be one hundred percent sure of living, we wouldn’t be on Mars.”
This was true. Bridget started to move Steuby’s hand. The dial turned. Monomethylhydrazine started dumping into the tank. It did not explode.
Riding another spike of optimism, Steuby ran to the door. Phobos was visible. They had about eight hours to get the hydrazine topped off and transferred, and then get themselves aboard the rocket. He checked the batteries. They were still pretty low.
“How much of a charge do we need?” Bridget asked.
“I have no idea,” Steuby said. “A few hours at least. It won’t take long to reach orbit, but once we’re out there we’d better be able to get the freighter’s attention and keep pinging them our position until they can get to us.”
“Assuming they want to get to us.”
“They will. The whole point of the Lift is to evacuate people, right? We’re people. We need evacuation.”
BRIDGET SPENT SOME time in the rocket’s crew capsule testing the electronics, which were in fine shape and included an emergency beacon on a frequency that was still standard. “Should we just set it off?” Steuby wondered. Bridget was against it on the grounds that nobody could get all the way across the planet to them and still make the last ship out, whereas if they sent an SOS from near-Mars space, a rendezvous would be easier. Steuby didn’t want to go along with this, but he had to admit it made sense.
Other than that, most of the work they had to do—filling tanks, keeping the solar array focused, monitoring the mix in the synthesizer—was in the shop, away from the omnipresent Martian dust. Most of it, anyway. Humankind had not yet invented the thing capable of keeping Mars dust completely out of an enclosed space. Even so, they couldn’t do everything inside. Bridget found some kind of problem with one of the battery terminals in the rocket, and they had to go out and pop the cover to see what was wrong. While she worked on it, Steuby watched the horizon.
A huge dust devil sprouted on the plain out past the edge of the settlement. They were common when Mars was near perihelion and its surface warmed up. Steuby and Bridget watched it grow and spiral up into the sky, kilometers high.
If that dust devil was a sign of a big storm developing, they were going to be in trouble. The rocket’s engines themselves wouldn’t be affected, but a bad dust storm would slow the recharging of the batteries by, oh, ninety-nine percent or so. That put the full charge of the rocket’s batteries, and therefore their departure, on the other side of their teeny-tiny launch window.
They could get into the rocket either way and hope it was charged up enough for its guidance systems not to give out before they achieved orbit, but that was one risk Steuby really didn’t want to pile on top of all the others they were already taking.
Steuby knew he was getting tired after a dozen runs back and forth to the rocket, and the hours spent working on machines without eating or sleeping. His ears rang and he was losing patience with Marco, who was saying maybe the rocket’s placement was for the best because this way they wouldn’t have to worry about the rocket’s exhaust pulverizing anything important when they lifted off.
Steuby just looked at him.
Oh, right, Marco said.
“Steuby!” Bridget shouted, and Steuby snapped out of his daydream. “That’s freaking me out. I’m alive. You want to talk to someone, talk to me. You want to go crazy and have conversations with dead people, do that after we’re on the rocket. Okay?”
He didn’t answer. She walked up to him and rapped her glove on his faceplate. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
She took a step back. Over their local mic he heard her sigh. “Let’s get these batteries covered up.”
It only took them a minute, but the dust devil was coming fast, and before they’d started the tractor again, it swallowed them up. Winds of this velocity would have flung them around like palm fronds on Earth, but in Mars’ thinner atmosphere it felt like a mild breeze. The sensory disconnect was profound. You saw a powerful storm, but felt a gentle push. Your mind had trouble processing it, had to constantly think about it the way you had to plan for Newton’s Second Law whenever you did anything in zero-G. In space, instincts didn’t work, and on Mars, they could be pretty confusing, too.
Steuby froze and waited for it to go away. It was only two or three hundred meters across, and passed quickly. But as the day went on, there would be more. Steuby looked at the sky, to the west. Phobos had risen. It was all Steuby could do not to mention it to Marco. He’s dead, he told himself. Let him be dead.
“Another hour going to be good enough for those batteries?” he asked. They got on the tractor and headed back toward the shop.
“Do we have more than another hour?”
“Not much.”
“Then there’s your answer.” Bridget paused. She swiped dust away from her faceplate. “Look, Steuby. We’re ready, right? There’s nothing else we need to do?”
He parked the tractor. “Soon as the last tank of NTO is onboard, that’s it. That’s all we can do.”
Bridget was quiet the whole time Steuby backed the tank into the airlock, closed the outer door, uncoupled the tank and pushed it into the shop, and closed the inner door. Then she said, “While you’re filling the tank, I need to borrow the tractor for a minute.”
“Borrow it? Why, do we need milk?”
“No, we need Marco.”
He dropped the hose coupling with a clang. “Are you nuts?”
“We have to bring him, Steuby. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Math,” Steuby said.
“Fix the math. Throw out what we don’t need. You said it yourself. If we don’t catch the freighter we’re going to die. What’s the point of having a month’s worth of food for a three-month trip? Or a three-hour trip? That might be all we need.”
“How the hell do we know what we’re going to need?” Steuby shouted. “Have you done this before? I haven’t!”
“I thought you hated quitters,” she said.
“I—” Steuby stopped. She had him. He looked up at the sky. Phobos was low on the horizon, maybe ten degrees up. Less than an hour until they needed to fire the engines. He remembered Marco talking about going back to Earth, and he knew Bridget was thinking the same thing.
“All right,” Steuby said. “Look. We’ll do it this way. You go get him. I’ll babysit the synthesizer. But if you’re not back by the time Number Nine is overhead, I’m going without you.”
“You will not.”
“Try me.”
She left without saying anything else. Steuby didn’t know if he was serious or not. Yes he did. He was serious. If she was going to make a dead body more important than two living people, those were priorities that Henry Caleb Steuben was proud not to share.
On the other hand, he couldn’t really climb up into the rocket and leave her to die. That wouldn’t be right.
On the other other hand, who the hell did she think she was, endangering their rendezvous with the freighter?
On the. . . what was this, the fourth hand?. . . it would be pretty ironic if Steuby took off without her and then missed the rendezvous anyway, so both of them got to die cursing the other one out.
There was also the entirely plausible scenario of them taking off on time and still missing the freighter, so they could die together.
While the synthesizer poured NTO into the tank, Steuby suggested to himself that he adopt a more positive outlook. Maybe we’ll make the freighter, he thought. It’s only six klicks to where Marco is. An hour out there and back, tops. Unless—
He called Bridget up on the line-of-sight fre
quency. She was just visible. “What?”
“So, um, you have something to cut that piece of the railing, right?” he asked.
“No, Steuby. I survived twenty years working in space by forgetting tools.” She broke the connection. Fine, he thought. Be pissed if you want.
Another dust storm rolled in maybe ninety seconds later. Figures, Steuby thought. Right when I have to go outside again.
ONE HUMAN-EQUIVALENT amount of mass had to come out of the rocket. Steuby stuck his head in the crew compartment. Dust blew in around him and he clambered in so he could shut the hatch. What could he get rid of? He started to panic. What if he threw something away and they needed it?
“Marco, help me out,” he said. Bridget wasn’t around. She couldn’t give him a hard time. He wished he’d been able to crunch all the launch calculations and see whether they had an extra eighty kilos of payload slack. Maybe he was worrying over nothing.
He wriggled through a tight hatch into the storage space below the cockpit. There were lockers full of crap back here. Five extra helmets and suits. He pushed three of them up into the cockpit. He found spare electronics and computer components. They piled up in the pilot’s seat. There were two water tanks. He took a deep breath and vented one of them even though he’d just filled it an hour ago. That saved almost a human’s worth of mass right there. Now that he’d started, though, Steuby couldn’t stop. What if one more thing thrown out the hatch was the difference between making that five point oh three kilometers per second and making a bright streak in the sky as they burned up on re-entry?
He stuck his head into the cockpit and saw that the dust storm had blown through again. The suits, spare gear, and a bunch of other stuff went out the hatch, banging against the gantry before falling to litter the launch pad.
In the west, Phobos was high, nearly forty-five degrees. Steuby pulled empty metal boxes out of the storage compartment and threw them out the hatch. Then he had to head for the shop and make sure the last fuel tank was topped off with NTO, or nothing he’d done in here would matter.
