Losing Mars

by Peter Cawdron

  “But?”

  “But I could hear you pleading with me. It was strange. Within the vision, you pushed me away, you shouted at me, but it was you—out here—calling to me, breaking the spell.”

  Scott asks the question I’ve been wondering. “Why? What does it stand to gain from any of this?”

  “I don’t know, but it wasn’t protecting anything. It was drawing me in, trying to catch me.”

  “And you think that’s what happened to the Chinese?”

  “Two dead. Two missing. I don’t know, but in my dream there were two Chinese taikonauts in the TV studio, and yet…”

  “What?”

  “It couldn’t have been them. Their life-support would have been exhausted by then. Hedy, yes, but they would have been dead by that point.”

  Jen asks, “Is there anything else you can tell us about what happened?”

  “No. Not really. It was creepy. On one hand, it was exhilarating. On the other, it felt like we were in a morgue.”

  Scott brings the conversation back to business. “Okay. We need you to have some breakfast, freshen up, and dock with the Schiaparelli. We’ll get you on your way back to Earth ASAP.”

  “Understood.”

  There’s comfort to be found in routine, in following orders and having a clear plan. As much as I don’t want to, I have to put this behind me. It’s over. There’s nothing more to be done for Hedy or the Chinese. As for whatever’s inside the Huŏxīng Wu, I’m sure both the Chinese and the Americans will be planning follow up missions. They’ll take years to get off the drawing board and will probably involve some kind of robotic probe to avoid the trap. I bet the guys back at Houston have been analyzing the electromagnetic blast that hit the Redstone and are already figuring out the level of shielding they’ll need on any subsequent flight.

  To the lay person, waiting years to examine an alien artifact might sound crazy, after all, we live in an instant society. Instant soup. Instant coffee. Fast food. It’s all at our fingertips. But when it comes to science, precision is king. Rush a launch and all you get is expensive fireworks. Cut corners and you get faulty mechanics. As the Mars Rovers demonstrated, a little more patience during the build leads to lifetimes that extend up to a decade beyond the original spec. Waiting might seem crazy, but science moves slowly to achieve astonishing results.

  I run an electric razor over my chin, floating in the storage area in the broad base of the capsule. A vacuum cleaner built into the razor sucks up the fine hairs. It feels good to rub my hand over smooth skin. I stow the shaver and work a dry shampoo through my hair, massaging my scalp. After toweling myself down and brushing my teeth, I change into a fresh set of clothes, feeling like a new man. Already, though, the Redstone is a lonely place. It’s going to be a quiet flight back to Earth. Oh, sure, I’ll blast music, read ebooks, send messages, but the delay between me and Mars is only going to grow. Replies from Jen will take longer and longer to reach me, making the isolation more acute.

  I have a bite to eat and something to drink, take one last look at the marvel that is Phobos, and place a radio call. Mars is still shrouded in darkness, but Phobos has caught the first rays of dawn. A thin red crescent breaks around the planet. Sunrise in orbit never gets old.

  “Shepard, Redstone. I’m ready to undertake docking with the Schiaparelli. I’m ready to go home. Over.”

  I strap into the commander’s couch, but unlike yesterday, I’m dressed casually. There’s no need for a spacesuit. Docking with the supply module is rudimentary. Press a couple of buttons and the computer guidance system will do the rest.

  There’s no reply.

  “Shepard, Redstone. Are you reading me? Over.”

  “Redstone. Please hold. Over.”

  “Copy that.”

  What the hell? Why would they?

  For a moment, my mind races to the worst possible scenario—they’ve had a hull breach in one of the modules. I’ve been so obsessed up here, I’ve forgotten that I’m not the only one living inside a tin can, with just a few thin sheets of metal and insulation separating me from instant death. Shepard is without its lifeboat. They’ve got three modules, so there’s redundancy in case of a catastrophic failure, but it’s easy to imagine them running out of options if they lost the bio-mod. My wife’s down there. I desperately want to jump on the channel and seek clarification, but they’ll come back to me when they can. Whatever’s happening, they need to focus on that, not some whiny little brat in orbit.

  Breathe, Cory.

  Stay focused.

  Follow your training.

  Anxiety is a strange bedfellow, an unwelcome guest. My muscles tense somewhat involuntarily. I’ve got to get used to this. There’s not a damn thing I can do to help Jen in any way at all for the best part of the next two years. Fuck, that doesn’t come easy.

  Serenity has never been a strong suit in my family. My father was an alcoholic. Although I’ve never spoken about it publicly, Jen knows. He’d get drunk and hit Mom, push us kids around. We’d bruise like apples, so he was careful. He didn’t want any of our teachers figuring it out.

  Dad was mercurial, swinging between extremes. Guilty and full of remorse one day, drunk as a skunk the next. I wanted to hate him, but I couldn’t. I could see the same traits welling up within me, and that scared me. I didn’t want to turn out like him. I was desperate to be better. Explains a lot about my life, really, but he had this poem hanging on the wall of our living room. I guess it was a prayer.

  Lord,

  Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

  Courage to change the things I can,

  And wisdom to know the difference.

  I never got it. Now I do, but back then, I didn’t. Why accept the things you cannot change? Isn’t that an admission of defeat? Why not just have the courage to change everything?

  I know it’s a bit sacrilegious given all my dad put us through, but to my mind he seemed to live by an alternative version of this prayer.

  Give me coffee for the things I can change,

  and tequila for those I can’t.

  As for knowing the difference, he was never good with that. Good old Mr. Fix It wanted it all, and I found myself thinking I could fix everything as well, but it’s just not possible. No amount of superglue will ever put a vase back together quite the way it was. Why would relationships be any different? He mellowed with age, but by then I was old enough to leave home. Jen was kind with me, exceptional really, soaking up my poor traits and helping me avoid Dad’s shortfalls.

  Ah, grant me serenity… It’s passive. Serenity is not something to be done, it’s a state of being, a way to live, an undoing—something my dad never understood. I guess it’s like trusting in a launch.

  I relax my hands. They’ve balled up into fists without me even realizing it. My arms drift up in front of me in response to the muscles in my neck and shoulder easing, releasing the pent-up stress. That poem doesn’t say I have to like accepting the things I cannot change, just that I have no other choice. Anxiety is the antithesis, maintaining an illusion that somehow stress can make a difference, when it can’t. I can’t lie to myself. This Mr. Fix It has to admit to himself he can’t fix everything.

  Breathe.

  It’s another three minutes and fourteen seconds before I hear from Shepard, not that I’m anxiously watching the flight clock or anything.

  “Redstone.”

  Just one word from Scott is enough to cut right through me. His voice is somber. Heavy. Reluctant. Sad. Resigned.

  “Shepard, this is Redstone. I am receiving you. Go ahead. Over.”

  The contrast of his one word to my eleven in reply speaks loudly. I’m nervous as hell. Jen takes over from Scott.

  “Cory. There’s one last task NASA have requested before you leave orbit.”

  Okay, so the delay was about me? I’m relieved but I hate the way my mind raced to doomsday scenarios down there.

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  �
�We debated whether to pass the request on to you. You’ve already been through so much. NASA thinks it’s low risk, but Lisa disagrees, and you know Lisa.”

  I smile, nodding, letting them see I’m not nervous. I am intensely curious, though. Lisa steps into the video.

  “They want you to conduct a low-level flyby of Stickney Crater. The Chinese set a lander down there. NASA wants high resolution footage of the area.”

  A lander? That explains how the artifact ended up within the Huŏxīng Wu, but there wasn’t anything docked when Hedy and I entered the Chinese craft.

  “Are they still down there?”

  “Unknown.”

  My heart goes out to Lisa. To anyone listening, it might seem as though she’s composed. It’s like I’m talking to someone without any emotional attachment, but the opposite is true. She’s hurting. I guess this is her way of dealing with the loss of Hedy, shutting up and closing off. It must be so hard on her.

  “And you don’t like it?”

  “Affirmative. Houston has sent through a burn sequence. It’s a light-powered pass, dropping as low as 500 meters, taking you below the crater wall by almost one and a half clicks. You’ll be inside the crater itself—surrounded on all sides. Now, Stickney’s big enough. The crater walls are shallow, sloping at fifteen to twenty-five degrees. That’s a nice incline. Easy to trace with an orbital pass.”

  “Okay.”

  I don’t see any issues with the proposal.

  “You’ll need a second burn on the far wall to come out of there, but that’s no problem. Given the low gravity, the Redstone is quite capable of performing this maneuver without the Schiaparelli.”

  Doesn’t sound bad to me. It’ll be a preprogrammed sequence. All I have to do is set the procedure and it’ll unfold as a series of timed burns. “But?”

  “I’m worried about any intrusion into the crater being perceived as hostile.”

  Given what happened to the Chinese, that’s understandable, but to me it seems unfounded. I can see why NASA thinks this is low-risk.

  I counter with, “The Chinese set down a lander without incident on at least one, possibly two occasions, right?”

  Lisa is clinical and concise in her analysis of what’s happened. “They woke something down there.”

  Yeah, that makes my blood run cold.

  She continues. “We all saw what happened when Hedy went into the Huŏxīng Wu. If you get hit with another EMP blast during a low altitude pass, you’ll crash.”

  She’s right. I listen, letting her talk, interested in her perspective.

  “NASA means well. They’re looking for clues. They’re trying to maximize observations while they still can, knowing it’ll be years before they get close to this thing again.”

  “Yep.”

  Jen speaks up, speaking as though she’s confessing to a murder. “I didn’t want to tell you. I wanted you to leave.”

  “I understand.” Jen means well. She’s not being selfish. She would have protested the same way regardless of whoever was up here given all that’s transpired. Physician’s instinct—reduce risk, preserve life.

  “Scott felt you needed to know. He thought it should be your decision.”

  It’s telling that Scott hasn’t said anything. He must be biting his lip, itching to present his case, but he won’t. I know him. If the women have protested and their concerns are valid, he’ll respect that and give them the air time they need. The team would have debated not only whether to present this to me, but how, including what was and what wasn’t said. Scott will keep his end of the bargain. I appreciate that.

  “Understood.”

  Lisa adds an afterthought. From the way she phrases it, I get the feeling this is what they debated at length.

  “There is another option.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You fly the Redstone dead-stick.”

  I don’t like the sound of that.

  “Your initial burn is from eighty clicks out, coming in from behind, cruising along side Phobos, letting gravity pull you in. You suit up and turn off the lights. Shutdown the computer. Kill everything, including life-support. But it would be a controlled shutdown, unlike the EMP blast, minimizing your electromagnetic footprint. Nothing running except the cameras.

  “It’s a hockey stick flight path. Gravity is slight. Barely half a centimeter a second. Like a feather falling, but falling nonetheless. We use that to arrest your motion, sweeping you in over the edge of the crater with perigee five hundred meters above the landing site.”

  I breathe deeply. Lisa has clearly done the math.

  “It’s like shooting an apple off someone’s head with a compound bow at a distance of a hundred yards. The fall of the arrow is all important. Get that right and it’s easy.”

  I can’t resist the counterargument. “Get it wrong and I graze the side of a moon.”

  “Yep… You’ll have thirty seconds at perigee before the pull of Phobos sucks you in.”

  “Thirty seconds?”

  “Forget about life-support. You can bring up electrical, computing and basic flight controls in under ten. Hit abort and you’ll shoot out to twenty thousand meters. I’ve run the numbers a dozen times. It’s the only way to be sure you don’t wake that damn thing again.”

  Finally, Scott speaks. “It’s your decision.”

  Jen says, “You don’t have to do this.”

  Phobos fills my window, calling to me. In thirty minutes, Houston will listen to this conversation but by then, either way, it’ll be all over. Regardless of what I decide, there won’t be any criticism. They know what I’ve been through, they saw everything that happened in the Chinese vessel, but this is our last opportunity to gain any additional insights into humanity’s first contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial species. We don’t understand what we’re dealing with. We have no idea what we’ve encountered, but it reasons. It thinks. It’s alive. It’s trying to interact with us. I know that from the fake television interview. Somehow, it comprehends our language and concerns, but its method of communication is on a level I can’t even begin to comprehend.

  My palms go sweaty. Fear wells up within me. What the hell was it doing onboard the Huŏxīng Wu? What happened to Hedy? Why did it kill the taikonauts? Does this thing have any awareness of what it’s done and the impact on our fragile lifeforms? How does it see us? Like ants swarming across the ground? No, there was recognition of our intelligence in those visions. It spoke to me, taking the form of a television host, a stage manager, a doctor, a nurse. Damn it! This shit freaks me out. I spoke with an alien, but without any comprehension of what it was or what it was trying to say.

  So many questions. The answers are only going to recede further behind me once I leave orbit. This is our only chance to gain a glimpse into what happened to the taikonauts on the surface. There’s really only one option.

  “I’ll do it—dead stick.”

  Inside the Crater

  I’m strapped in, suited up and running on my own internal power, breathing from my backpack. The cabin is depressurized. Communications and life-support have already been powered down. From out here, drifting out behind Phobos, the moon looks small, barely the size of my outstretched, gloved hand. Mars looms beyond Phobos.

  I double check the navigation console, making sure the mission clock on my wrist pad is in sync, counting down to the point I need to fire the abort thrusters within the crater. A big red button dominates the console as the seconds tick down to the main engine burn, giving me the option to abort the run entirely. With two seconds to go, the button is disabled. Too late now. The engine engages, accelerating me smoothly, sending me on what looks like a collision course with the moon. I’m moving in retrograde, losing my orbital momentum, dropping back toward Phobos, looking to graze the moon. In theory, if I were to clear the crater entirely, I’d swing in a highly ecliptic, almost hyperbolic orbit, coming back to roughly this point again before circling in a second time. I’m a tennis ball tied to
a piece of string being swung around a pole.

  The engines cut out and I’ve now got as much control as a cannonball in flight. Success or failure depends on math. Physics is precise, predictable, but I feel as though I’m about to crash. I’m descending into hell.

  I undergo a controlled shutdown of the core systems. At each point, a perplexed computer asks me if I’m sure. It’s as though even the lifeless electronics within the spacecraft think I’m dumb. Cameras are rolling, but there won’t be any panning or zooming, just a wide angle shot in high definition, aligned to catch the landing spot as I pass overhead. Personally, I won’t be looking for the point the taikonauts touched down. I’ll be sweating on the restart procedure. There will be plenty of time to review the clip later.

  As I’m coasting, there’s nothing to do but watch as the rocky surface of the moon slowly fills the windows. The craters are worn and smooth.

  I mumble, “Phobos has had more hits than Elvis.”

  I’m coming from out of the sun, racing in toward Phobos and Mars beyond. My hands grip the armrests. There’s no shaking, no rattling, no sensation of speed at all, which robs me of the tension of the moment. It would be easier if I was holding on for dear life. As it is, I’m skating across the ice.

  A boulder field passes beneath me. Craters pockmark the surface of the moon, having been weathered by billions of years of exposure to the harsh environment of space. I’m tiny. A gnat on the windscreen, sailing by just inches from the glass.

  Phobos is irregular in shape. There are hills and depressions, smooth plains and steep cliffs, ravines and canyons. I can feel the Redstone slowing, caught in the grip of the moon. I’m dragged closer. Thousands of tiny craters pepper the surface, overlaid upon larger, older craters. Crushed rock has been scattered across the ground by each thundering impact, appearing like paint splatter stretching out over a clean canvas. Lower still. Closer.

  Beyond the curved leading edge of the moon lies the Valles Marineris and the Eos Chaos thousands of miles below on Mars. If I wasn’t so terrified, I’d think it was beautiful.