Losing Mars

by Peter Cawdron

  “I’m proud of you, Cory. I love you, and I appreciate what you’re doing. I just wish I was up there with you.”

  “I know.”

  Shadows grow beneath the Orion. The desert turns dark, washing away like blood. The planet is sinking into an impenetrable shadow. We both know what’s coming. Neither of us say anything, both listening for the crackle on the radio and the loss of signal. It’s faint, barely a murmur on the line, and with that, she’s gone.

  “All good?” Hedy asks as I switch between channels, trying to relay the signal through a nearby satellite and reconnect with Shepard. I reply, but my answer is shallow, predictable.

  “All good.” Was any other response ever really possible?

  “Shepard, do you have AOS? Shepard, can you hear us?”

  There’s a choppy, “Yes,” followed by some garbled words. That’s probably as good as we’ll get until we have line-of-sight comms again.

  We complete our orbital maneuvers and, according to radar imaging, we’re just over 1,000 kilometers ahead of Phobos, roughly a hundred kilometers above the moon’s orbital path. Rather than catching Phobos, we’re allowing Phobos to catch us.

  Orbital mechanics are a little like two cars on the freeway, both rushing along at sixty miles an hour. If there’s a slight difference in their speeds, one will appear to gain on the other but at what seems like a walking pace. In the same way, we’re higher and slower than Phobos, watching as it catches up to us, conducting essentially the same maneuver we did with the Schiaparelli, but on a grander scale. Once we’re close, we’ll drop down onto the same orbital path and move into a Lagrange point between Phobos and Mars.

  Space isn’t flat. Gravity bends spacetime, leaving it warped, only it’s not twisted evenly. It might be invisible to our eyes, but space has hills and valleys—places where the gravity of different objects becomes extreme or balances out. Once we’re in a parking orbit below Phobos, we’ll be like the handkerchief tied around a length of rope in a tug-o-war, caught in the middle of an entire planet and a moon both wrestling for our mass. We’ll float freely between the two, still whizzing around Mars, but in a stable spot near Phobos, somewhere we can maintain our position without the need for firing our thrusters.

  There’s something utterly surreal about watching Phobos approach. It’s another world, entirely independent of Mars, but it’s inextricably bound to the red planet. It’s twilight on Mars but Phobos is high enough and out to one side, so it’s still catching sunlight. The team back in Houston will be tracking our motion and that of the tiny moon.

  I’m not sure what time it is for the guys at Shepard, but as dusk approaches in a few hours and night falls, I’m sure they’ll be looking up at the sky, watching, waiting for that tiny moon to appear, knowing we’re up here closing in on a lump of rock soaring across their horizon.

  The smooth motion of Phobos against the backdrop of Mars makes it somewhat hypnotic to watch. Far below, barely visible in the shadows, craters and canyons roll by. Overlaid on top of them is a reddish asteroid resplendent in the sunlight, slowly growing in size as it approaches, clearly in motion above the planet. Timing is everything. Hedy activates the approach routine. From here, our motion is again under computer control.

  Phobos is stunning, slowly filling our windows as we drop into its orbit. With a shape like that of a walnut and a diameter of roughly twenty-seven kilometers, Phobos is the size of a large city. It’s basically, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens adrift in space.

  Visually, Phobos is breathtaking. A fine coating of dark, muddy brown dust covers the surface of the moon, but the eroded crater walls are slightly red, just like the planet it orbits. The craters themselves are smooth, rounded after billions of years spent colliding with meteors ranging in size from skyscrapers to dust particles. It’s as though someone took a ball hammer to a lump of clay, denting it like a panel-beater hitting sheetmetal or a blacksmith working with steel.

  Phobos has stretch marks, lines running along its side, marking where the stress of such a close orbit is slowly tearing the moon apart. Give it another fifty million years and Phobos will collide with Mars, not in one piece but in hundreds of thousands as it shatters under tidal stress.

  “Coming around.”

  Both size and distance are deceptive in space. Even though Phobos dominates our windows, it’s impossible to spot the Huŏxīng Wu. It’s a bit like trying to spot a red delivery van while hovering over New York City in a helicopter. All we know is they’re out there somewhere.

  “Approaching Stickney.”

  The most distinct feature on Phobos is Stickney Crater, a massive impact site some nine kilometers in diameter, dominating the closest surface to Mars. Phobos, it seems, has been in a fender bender. The hood has been punched in.

  Like all objects in space, Phobos rotates, but like Earth’s moon, its rotation is in lock-step with its host planet, meaning the same surface always faces Mars. From this altitude, Mars looks magnificent, stretching out below us, dominating the horizon.

  “Radar is tracking an object at L1.”

  “That’ll be them.” Hedy punches in a few navigation commands. “Moving in to five hundred meters. Holding station roughly fifteen clicks above Phobos.”

  Unlike the movies, there are no blazing rockets, no flames shooting out into the darkness. On the contrary, we’re decelerating under short bursts from our reaction jets, dropping in place in front of Phobos. This is the celestial equivalent of parallel parking outside a shopping mall. We’re still a long way off, drifting into place, allowing ourselves to be captured by the moon. Maneuvers like this are impossible under manual control. The subtlety is beyond human reckoning. Sci-fi films love having Buck Rogers or Luke Skywalker pulling hard on a joystick, flying instinctively by the seat of their pants. Reality begs to differ. Our placement into the Lagrange point between Phobos and Mars is being undertaken with surgical precision by computer control. Anything less would be disastrous. Come charging in and we’d waste fuel braking, fuel we need to leave Mars orbit and later to slow down when we finally get back to Earth. In addition to that, if we get too close to the Huŏxīng Wu, we could perturb its orbit, nudging it without even touching it, sending it drifting outside this gravitational plateau.

  The Redstone rotates. Bursts from the reaction jets align our craft, adjusting both our orientation and relative motion. Just a brief puff of gas is enough to turn us around and begin arresting our momentum. Slowly, we inch closer, drifting into a stable orbit.

  “On approach.”

  Hedy’s speaking for the guys back at Shepard. If they’re not already watching, they’ll be listening, waiting, desperate to re-acquire our signal.

  Phobos grows outside our window. It’s smooth, irregular shape makes it look more like an asteroid than a moon.

  Phobos is small in comparison to Earth’s moon. Its reduced mass means we reach our rest stop at Lagrange point L1 a mere sixteen kilometers from the surface. On Earth, commercial airliners fly at an altitude of anywhere from ten to fourteen kilometers, while the Concorde used to cruise at eighteen!

  Given Phobos is twenty-seven km in diameter, we’re close. Damn close. So close, it feels as though I could reach out and touch the cratered surface. In any other context, we’re so close we’d crash. If it weren’t for the mass of Mars immediately behind us, balancing the pull of Phobos, we’d collide with the moon.

  Stickney Crater is roughly the length of Manhattan. There are craters within craters within craters down there—it’s a World War I battlefield, the battle of the Somme minus only the barbed wire and shattered trees.

  The variety of colors dotted across the surface of Phobos reveal its rich mineral content. Splashes of orange and red cut through the dark carbonaceous dust covering the moon. Cracks open out into gullies, exposing whitish bedrock. The angle of the sun leaves shadows stretching across the surface. Even though night is falling on Mars, Phobos is yet to move into the planet’s shadow. We’ve got maybe another hour or so of
daylight, at most.

  Hedy works with the control panel, speaking with slow, deliberate clarity.

  “Huŏxīng Wu, Huŏxīng Wu. This is Redstone. Are you receiving us?”

  There’s no response.

  “Huŏxīng Wu. This is Redstone. We are a US spacecraft launched from Shepard base in the Eos Chaos. We are five hundred meters from your position, holding steady on the edge of L1. We are here in response to a distress signal relayed to us from the Chinese National Space Agency in Beijing. Over.”

  While she’s talking, I direct our docking camera at their spacecraft. It’s a high resolution camera, far better than an eyeball. Their craft is rotating slowly. Something’s imparted a slight wobble to its motion, probably the explosion. Sunlight reflects off the hull of the vessel, but there are no lights within the cabin. The windows appear dark. The Chinese solar arrays are deployed, but aren’t set at a right angle to the sun. They won’t be drawing much power. Hedy looks at the screen in front of me as she talks.

  “Huŏxīng Wu. This is Redstone. We are here to render assistance. Do you read us? Over.”

  Nothing.

  “What’s the plan, boss?”

  Perhaps it’s presumptuous, but I’m expecting Hedy to have me conduct a powered EVA, crossing the half a kilometer separating the Redstone from the Huŏxīng Wu, but the look on her face suggests otherwise. There’s steely resolve in her eyes. Iron in her spine. Fire in her soul. She’s not hiding behind anyone or anything.

  “The helm is yours. Time to suit up.”

  Hedy’s going to tackle this herself. We’ve been on the move for seven hours since we woke, over eighteen hours if I count back to the launch, but now is when the real work begins. I help her into a far bulkier EVA flight suit designed to hook up to a portable jetpack and cope with the harsh environment of space for prolonged periods of time. It’s akin to helping a knight put on armor in preparation for battle. Thick white material wraps around her fragile frame, promising to protect her from the vacuum. Suiting up is extremely personal. It’s unavoidable. We’re inches apart as I help her into the upper torso of the suit. She holds onto the Redstone to steady us both as I flitter around her, checking connections and locking sections.

  “Looking good,” I say, securing her life-support system. I’m firm, bordering on rough as I cinch straps and pull hard on locking rings, making sure she’s set.

  “You’re not going to have a lot of time out there.” I’m stating the obvious, but it’s taken at least twenty minutes to get her ready for her EVA, and I have to put on a lightweight suit before we can decompress the cabin and open the hatch. I don’t need to see a clock to know we’re approaching twilight on the short day/night cycle on Phobos. The crater shadows on the moon have shifted to one side. From our perspective, sunset isn’t far off. I don’t say as much, but I’m suggesting Hedy might want to wait for the next orbit so she has a full six hour EVA without the added challenge of navigating between spacecraft in the dark.

  “I’m good to go.”

  I lower her helmet in place, locking the aluminum collar. Her face is set like stone. If this was a game of poker, every other player at the table would fold before Hedy, wilting under her gaze.

  “Suiting up.” I leave her visor raised, and somersault through the air, orienting myself so I can climb into my suit as quickly as possible. Ideally, there should always be an extra set of helping hands but we’ve trained for this, and I’m on a roll, moving with precision.

  We both lock our visors, switching to internal power and life support. Since control of the Redstone has been handed over to me, I begin flushing the cabin, purging our atmosphere. From within our suits, there’s no difference beyond the loss of sound. The silence, though, is overwhelming, just the hum of air circulating within the suit, the sound of my own breathing and the occasional comment over the radio. With a near vacuum inside the cabin, there’s no medium for even the wrinkle of suit material to be passed so watching Hedy move is like watching television with the speakers muted.

  “Shepard, this is Redstone, we are ready for EVA. Commander Hedy Washington will conduct the EVA. Pilot Cory Anderson will remain with the Redstone. Over.” It’s strange talking about myself in the third person, and we’re transmitting both video and audio so the plan is pretty obvious, but like everything in space, there’s safety in following a standard procedure.

  Scott replies, “Copy that, Redstone. We have established relay through the MRO. Reception is patchy and may drop out, but we have telemetry, video and audio streaming clear and being passed on to Earth. God speed.”

  I say, “Elapsed mission time is launch plus 19 hours and 14 minutes, and the hatch is open.” My gloves are thinner than Hedy’s so I work the ratchet. Precision machined parts interlock with each other, moving as though they were greased. Sunlight catches the hatch as it opens outward. I push back, getting out of her way, using my hands to help position Hedy so she can negotiate the hatch in her bulky suit.

  “Tether attached. Exiting Redstone.” Hedy will keep the two meter tether locked onto an anchor point on the outside of the craft until she hooks up to the OMU stored in the payload bay. Once she’s in place, she’ll confirm the jets on her orbital maneuvering unit are functional. Only then will she detach and begin her cruise to the stricken Chinese vessel.

  It takes very little fuel to fly around in space—which is something Hollywood consistently gets wrong. Spacewalks are like iceskating. One good push and away you go. There’s no need for rockets blazing all the way. An astonishingly small amount of gas provides the reaction jets with their push. Unlike a car engine, they’re only needed sporadically. Perhaps space gliding would be a better term than space walking.

  After a few minutes, Hedy says, “I have the OMU and can confirm independent motion on all three axis. I am good to go.”

  As I’m watching, I already knew that, but she’s talking for those piecing together events after the fact. I attach a tether and stand/float in the hatchway, waist deep within the craft. The hatch bumps softly into my life-support unit.

  I give Hedy a thumbs up, saying, “Copy that, Commander. You are clear for transit to the Huŏxīng Wu.”

  Technically, Hedy doesn’t need permission from me, but validating each step ensures everyone’s aware of what’s happening. No surprises. Hedy releases her tether and drifts aft. The thick canvas strap waves with residual motion, but not as though it’s being moved by some ethereal wind. Rather, it looks like it’s caught in the current of a stream.

  Short, sharp bursts of reaction gas shoot from the OMU as Hedy orients herself. For each action, such as turning, she also undertakes a corresponding reaction to arrest that motion. If she didn’t, a single burst would leave her pirouetting like a skater on ice. She looks over her shoulder and offers a thumbs up before jetting away toward the Chinese craft. Just a couple of bursts, and she begins coasting across the void.

  I feel helpless, watching as she slowly recedes into the distance. I cannot help but feel as though this is the last time I’ll see her alive.

  Oxygen

  Phobos looms to my left—a wall of rock so close, it’s hard not to imagine the Redstone isn’t plummeting toward it. The Redstone is falling, but like Phobos it’s falling around Mars. That falling sensation, though, is overwhelming, and given the moon is so close, it’s disconcerting to see the rough, cratered surface blocking out one half of the sky. It feels as though I’m just seconds away from crashing. I could swear the Redstone is losing altitude, but the reading on my wrist pad assures me that’s an illusion.

  I should retreat inside the Redstone but I feel part of things out here. The tiny computer screen on my forearm has the video feed from Hedy’s helmet cam. As she disappears into the distance, the Huŏxīng Wu grows on the screen.

  Hedy says, “Two meters per second. Fifty meters out. Slowing to one meter.”

  I try hailing the Chinese one last time. “Huŏxīng Wu, this is Redstone. We have an astronaut inbound to you using an
orbital maneuvering unit. Currently fifty meters off your port side. Over.”

  Seconds pass like hours.

  Hedy comes to a halt. “Stationary at ten meters.”

  The Huŏxīng Wu is undulating, twisting, spinning slightly off-axis. Hedy talks us through her observations.

  “Hatch is open. There’s some kind of light within, but it’s flickering, it’s a point light, with—with sporadic flashes, like that of an arc welder. I see burn marks—scorching around the entrance… There’s a debris cloud out here. Things have drifted out through the hatch. Wrappers. Scraps of plastic. A pen. I see a glove.”

  Scott’s voice is solemn, grave. “Any signs of life?”

  “No. None.”

  “We’re still receiving telemetry from the Huŏxīng Wu showing two heartbeats, but it’s relayed from Earth. It’s at least fifty minutes old.”

  “Moving closer.”

  “Proceed with caution.” Okay, Scott. What’s with that comment? I don’t say anything, but he can’t be thinking she’s going to dart inside in a hurry. Besides, up here, Hedy’s in command. Old habits, I guess.

  Hedy says, “I make the rotation of the craft at roughly twenty seconds with the lateral wobble of less than a meter… Positioning myself in front of the nose cone… And rolling.”

  Hedy is slick. When she first faced the Huŏxīng Wu head on, the craft was spinning, but now she’s matched the roll, it appears almost stationary with a slight rocking motion. I’m still trying to figure out how she pulled off that maneuver. She had to have fired multiple jets at once, and with a deft touch. Damn, I couldn’t have pulled that off. The effect is such that, instead of the Chinese craft turning, Mars begins spinning as the Huŏxīng Wu remains still relative to her.

  “Careful.”

  Okay, that dumbass comment was from me. Sheesh, any more advice? Like she isn’t already thinking exactly the same thing.