Nikita activated direct piloting mode, and started the ship on its new course at twenty meters a second.
“I'm going to go outside, so I can go and get him if he changes his mind,” Martin blurted out.
“Are you sure?” Kinuko asked, alarmed. “You'll be at much greater risk of flying debris out there than you would be in here.”
“If he decides to egress, we may not have an hour to get ready and then get out and fly over to him. I'll strap onto an SEV, and wait in the bay until either this situation ends or my life support warning comes on,” he replied.
“Okay,” Aleksandr said. “I admire your heart in doing this. Go ahead. We'll have stopped in our new spot before you get out, most likely. Alessia, keep trying to reach Tung-chi.”
The Chinese ship began to recede in the camera's view as they moved away from it.
Tung-chi supposed the cabin was three-quarters pressurized now, but didn't want to remove his helmet just yet. He had managed to steady his nerves. Being the first man on Mars would have its advantages, even if it made China – and him – a pariah. He didn't want to think about facing the others after meeting back up with the IME, however. Would they have him back? Would he even make it back? The other astronauts had been more like family to him than his own family had. Nobody was pushing him to achieve ever greater feats. They weren't obsessed with bringing glory to their countries. A spirit of peace and cooperation prevailed on board – and he had betrayed them.
He peeked out of the porthole and, to his surprise, the IME was gone. They had abandoned him! But he moved first, he thought to himself. As the minutes ticked by, he pondered China's record on Mars exploration. It wasn't good. Of the seven probes they had sent this way, only one had made it to the surface. It was a static lander, near the north pole, that had transmitted data for exactly 100 days before falling silent. How, then, could they build a fully-functioning manned Mars lander and ascent stage, have it sit in space for nearly a year, and expect it all to work? It was madness. They were gambling with his life. If he died in the landing attempt, he would be hailed a hero – a true Communist who gave his life for the motherland. It didn't matter to the Party, really, whether he lived or died. They would have their hero either way. So what if the rest of the world didn't like it? Such was China's economic and military power now that they could take the scorn and shrug it off. The West wouldn't stop doing business with China over something like this – if the lack of human rights hadn't stopped them, neither would reneging on an international space mission. He was their pawn. Tung-chi as an individual didn't matter.
Nobody knew where in Mission Control the leak came from. He or she was probably very rich by now, having sold the story of the century. Within minutes, the Internet and global news networks were electrified. “CHINA ABANDONS INTERNATIONAL MARS MISSION; SENDS OWN SHIP TO SURFACE!” read the headlines, accompanied by pictures of the alien-looking silver craft. Within hours, there was hardly a man, woman, or child on Earth who didn't know what was going on. It was decided that the media would be allowed back into Mission Control, to report on events as they happened. A press conference would be given every hour.
The IDSA was immediately besieged with requests for information. Everyone going in or out of the complex, including the janitors and cafeteria workers, were mobbed by the press such that the police had to escort them for their safety.
An hour and a half later, the pressure equalized outside Tung-chi’s spacesuit, and he removed his helmet. A small lighting panel was the only illumination in the cabin, other than the flat screen on which the original instructions still glowed. He looked out of one window and saw Mars as a crescent, as he approached its sunlit side. From the other window, Phobos was completely dark. The IME was nowhere to be seen. Earth was hundreds of millions of kilometers away, and he had heard nothing from them. He didn’t know when, or even if, the deorbit would take place. He felt, and was, utterly alone in what could very likely become his orbiting casket.
Tung-chi felt overwhelming pangs of regret and fear. Dare he switch his radio back on, and call the IME? Hopefully she could still be called; if she was on the other side of Mars or Phobos she would be out of communications range. He switched it on. Silence.
“Um, guys…” he said, feebly. The response was immediate. It was Alessia’s voice.
“Tung-chi! How are you? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I’m so sorry for leaving you guys. I want to come back, if you’ll have me back…” He paused. “This ship says it’s going to deorbit, but I have no idea where or when. It’s completely automatic.”
“Of course we’ll have you back. Martin’s outside on an SEV, just in case we had to come and get you. We’re only ten kilometers away. Can you get your hatch open?”
“Let me see… no, it only opens inwards, and the cabin’s pressurized, so I can’t open it.”
Christopher’s voice was heard next. In the background, Aleksandr could be heard relaying the latest developments to Mission Control.
“Okay, Tung-chi, listen. There’s probably a valve somewhere, so you can depressurize manually. Look all around; it could be anywhere. The door’s a good place to start.”
Tung-chi put his helmet back on, just in case he did find the valve, and started looking. He searched the door, walls, floor, and ceiling. Nothing.
“I can’t find one.”
“Dammit.”
Christopher turned to the others, and said, “They’ve put a valve like that on every capsule since the 1960s, when a cosmonaut died because he couldn’t get the door open, but of course they didn’t put one on this thing.” He spoke to Tung-chi again.
“Are there any controls in there at all? Anything?”
“No – just this touchscreen computer.”
Nikita said, “It looks like we’re starting to drift further away from Phobos now, since we’re no longer at the Lagrange point. I’ll put us on automatic station-keeping, but that’ll use up maneuvering system fuel since we’ll be fighting Mars’ gravity.”
“Do it,” Aleksandr said.
“Tung-chi, we have to see if you can hack into a system menu or something. There may be an option to depressurize,” Christopher said. “Don’t suppose you know what OS it’s running?”
“No idea,” came the reply.
“I’m going to fly over by him, so I can get him when he opens the hatch,” Martin said.
“Go ahead,” Aleksandr said. Martin undocked SEV 2, turned it around, and headed away towards the Chinese ship. It was now just a pinpoint of light from their vantage point.
“Okay, try this –” Christopher said. “Do as many combinations of touch gestures you can on the screen. Anything. It doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, I’ll try and find out something from this end.”
Tung-chi did as he was instructed. He tried multiple swipes up, down, and sideways. He tried tapping at various points, circular gestures, and two-finger swipes. Nothing. He guessed, correctly, that he wasn’t supposed to be able to control the ship.
Martin approached the silver craft, and slowed to a crawl as he did a careful inspection of the outside. All silver, with no markings at all save its name (in both English and Chinese), the flag, and the CNSA logo. It could have been something from Flash Gordon. As he approached the front, he looked in the porthole. At first, Tung-chi didn’t see him, as he was busy trying to hack into the computer. Only when he took a short break did he glance up and see the SEV floating nearby. He waved enthusiastically, and Martin waved back.
“Who’s that?” he asked, having forgotten the earlier conversation in his state of confusion.
“It’s Martin. He volunteered to come over and get you. We backed off to a safe distance, in case anything goes wrong with that ship.”
“I’m running out of ideas for things I can try here.”
“Okay,” Christopher said. “I’ve been doing some research. I theorized that it may be Android running on that computer – the touchscreen part, of course, not the
ship’s main computer. As of version 27.4, there was a known back-door hack that you could use to get access to system-level functions. It caused all kinds of trouble with people hacking information kiosks. It may just be possible that the Chinese used it, and didn’t patch it. It was out at about the time they were probably building and commissioning that thing. So, try this. Try one tap in the top left, two in the top right, three in the bottom right, then five in the bottom left. It’s the Fibonacci sequence, as you keep going round the screen. Not sure how many times you’d have to do it. Just give it a try.”
Tung-chi started desperately tapping in the sequence in the corners of the screen. His frightened, sleep-deprived mind fogged over at thirteen, and he lost count of how many times he had tapped so he had to start over. He patiently, and more slowly, started to tap the requisite number of times. He had Christopher read off the sequence to him so he didn’t have to try and remember it. Minutes ticked by, as he tapped out the sequence: one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four…
“Chris, it worked! There’s a menu now, in the top corner of the screen!”
“Great! What options does it have?”
“System, Environment, Avionics, Navigation, Communications.”
“Press Environment.”
“It says: Temperature, Humidity, Pressurization Schedule… here it is, Depressurize!”
“Press it!”
He did so, and hurriedly put his suit glove back on. “It’s working!” he said, as he felt the cabin pressure decrease. Martin hovered outside the hatch. “I’m pulling on the hatch door handle, but I can’t get it open yet,” Tung-chi said.
“Okay, keep trying,” Christopher said. The minutes ticked by. The depressurization option obviously hadn’t been intended for use in an emergency.
“We’ll have you out of there soon,” Martin said. “It can’t be long now.”
“Yes, I can already feel my suit stiffening up. It must be nearly a vacuum again. Still trying the door… oh, shit!”
“What?”
“It says: SECURE RESTRAINTS! DEORBIT SEQUENCE INITIATING IN ONE MINUTE!”
“Oh, crap!” came Christopher’s voice from the Explorer. “Keep pulling on that door! Although, it’ll have to be almost a complete vacuum before you can open it.” Tung-chi kept tugging as hard as he could.
“Thirty seconds,” Christopher announced, as he had been keeping track of the time since the announcement.
“Twenty seconds.”
“Ten seconds.”
“It’s coming open!”
One mighty wrench, and the door came open. Tung-chi started trying to squeeze himself through the opening, head-first. He made it almost halfway out.
Christopher, who was watching the action through the ship’s telescope, yelled, “Martin! Get back! It’s starting!” Smoke started to billow from the center of the ship’s rear end. Tung-chi knew he would not get out in time. “I’m sorry…” he said sadly. Martin backed the SEV away from the ship just as the smoke abruptly turned into a long, bright spear of flame. The craft accelerated quickly, heading down and to the left of Martin’s SEV as he watched helplessly. The crew aboard the IME looked on in horror. Tung-chi was going to Mars.
62
Tung-chi was still halfway out of the hatch when the rocket fired. The G-force from the acceleration was by far the greatest force that had acted on his body in many months. It pinned him painfully against the bottom of the hatch. With difficulty, he managed to pull himself back in, and collapsed to the floor. He couldn’t stand up against the acceleration, so he just lay there. So, this is where my childhood love of rocketry and science got me, he thought to himself miserably. He knew that as soon as the deorbit burn was done, he would only have a short time of weightlessness again in which to close and lock the hatch, before the friction with Mars’ upper atmosphere would heat the outside of the craft to thousands of degrees.
Christopher said, “I can’t keep the telescope on it; it’s moving too fast.”
“Yeah, we went through that with the whole comet ordeal. What we should have done, that I only thought of later, was move the ship as well as the telescope,” Martin said, as he headed back. “Then we could have observed it without putting ourselves at great risk.”
“Brilliant! Goddamn, sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to think of at the time. Computer, use both the ship’s attitude and the telescope mounts to keep radar target A3 in view,” Christopher said. It obeyed, and the Mars-bound craft appeared in the large window showing the telescope view. Its engine burned brightly and the Martian surface moved by quickly in the background.
“Look! I think he’s stuck!” Emile exclaimed, as he saw Tung-chi hanging out of the hatch. “If he falls out, there’ll be no way to recover him. An SEV can’t move that fast, and this ship sure as heck can’t.”
“Nope: she’s a marathon runner, not a sprinter,” Nikita said, as he watched anxiously. They were glued to the screen, silently praying. They let out a small cheer when they saw him manage to ingress, even if the door was still open. Aleksandr relayed the events to Mission Control as they happened.
* * *
@KR_IME: MAN OVERBOARD! PRAYING FOR A SAFE END TO THIS.
* * *
By now, their story was the world’s story. Everyone with access to TV or the Internet watched, with a twelve-minute delay, as the real-life space opera played out. Antagonism towards China was already growing. Web sites and social media pages spewing hate and venom towards the country were appearing. Tung-chi, curiously, was being hailed as a hero – not in the pioneer space explorer sense, but as the victim of a harsh and unscrupulous state that had put him in a position he never would have chosen for himself. This was mainly due to the world having watched, almost live, the heartbreaking sight of the craft zooming off towards Mars with the hapless taikonaut hanging out of the door.
All humanity watched as the engine burn stopped, and Tung-chi’s arm eventually reached out and pulled the door closed. The Martian surface sped by in the background.
“Now that we’re out of danger, let’s get back to the Phobos Lagrange point so we can stop wasting ACS fuel on station-keeping,” Aleksandr said. Nikita commanded the computer to move the ship back to its former spot, three kilometers from Phobos.
“Computer, display trajectory of radar target A3, on a 2D plane aligned to its orbit. Include Mars, and the IME's track too,” Nikita said. A large window appeared next to the telescope view, showing the Mars-bound spacecraft's projected orbital track. It changed over time as the engine burn altered its path. They watched anxiously as the door remained open. Eventually the red line no longer went past Mars, but into its atmosphere. Then the engine stopped burning.
“So that's the entry point,” Aleksandr said, nodding slowly. “What's our range to Tung-chi now?”
“458 kilometers, and increasing fast,” Nikita said.
“His transfer time to the entry interface?”
“One hour and forty-two minutes.”
“Good, then that at least gives him time to get his door shut.”
They watched in silence. The craft grew smaller in the telescope's view.
“Computer, auto-adjust magnification,” Martin said. It suddenly grew large again, even at its great range, as the optical system swapped one lens for another. The sun glinted off its polished silver surface. Soon after that, Tung-chi reached out and closed the hatch. They cheered.
“Phew,” Alessia said, amid a collective sigh of relief.
“Yeah,” Emile said. “At least if he doesn't make it down now it won't be his fault.”
“Is any of this his fault?” Christopher asked.
“Well, nobody made him leave the Explorer,” Martin said.
“True, but this is China we're talking about. We don't know what they threatened him or his family with,” Christopher replied. “This is the same country that deliberately littered low Earth orbit with shards of small fast-moving space junk in 2007, when th
ey blew a satellite up just to prove a point.”
“Yeah,” Martin sighed.
“Tung-chi, can you hear us?” Alessia asked over the comms.
“I'm here, and am okay so far,” came the reply.
“Okay. Keep us updated.”
63
In the tiny ship, Tung-chi had easily pulled himself up to a standing position once the engine had stopped. Grabbing the handhold to the left of the hatch, he pulled the door shut and locked it. He then swung himself back to the seat, fastened his seat belt, and plugged his suit’s oxygen and electrical system back into the ports to his right to keep them charged for whatever would come next.
He hoped that the G-force from the atmospheric entry wouldn't be too severe – he was out of condition to deal with it. The upright position of the seat flew in the face of all other entry vehicle designs, which had the astronaut lying in a couch position. This was so that the main force acted upon his back, rather than draining the blood away from his brain and pooling it in his feet. He wished for some – any – information about the journey, or some contact from his Chinese masters. They would no doubt be watching closely. If only they had enough respect for their pawn – er, taikonaut – to keep him in the loop, he thought, as he looked out of the right porthole at Mars. The surface was now much closer.
An hour later, the IME was back in its science orbit, floating over the rocky terrain of Phobos. The Chinese Chopper, as they had nicknamed it, was now far below them, approaching the surface of Mars at an increasing rate as the planet's gravity drew it in. It was still just about visible through their powerful telescope, but their most precise data on its whereabouts was through the ship’s powerful radar.
“We're leaving him behind,” Kinuko said.
“Yeah, our cross-range distance to him is over 3,000 kilometers now,” Christopher said, “and our vertical distance is over 5,000 kilometers. His trajectory will take him into the atmosphere at about 30 degrees from the vertical. We'll be able to see him enter the atmosphere, but we'll lose sight of him after that.”
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