Martian Valkyrie

by G. David Nordley

  I prayed for equanimity in the face of such arrogance, and my prayer was answered—-with the Lord s help, I did not lose my temper, but instead answered in measured tones. “I’m verv sorry you feel that way. But we can’t let past disagreements stand in the way. When we … I mean, if it may be necessary for me to rescue your people, I will need your cooperation. Over.”

  I waited a minute to hear him snort and shout, “Halvorsen out!” Touchy hombre, Halvorsen.

  We watched the Norwegians on our telescopes as it approached time for their course correction. Our ships were getting closer every day, on paths that would arrive at Mars separated only by hours, and within the last week had gotten close enough so that our twenty-meter baseline synthetic-aperture optics could see the details of their ship’s construction. Each Norwegian ship appeared to be a bundle of four squat cylinders sitting on their ends in a saucer-shaped heat shield. Range and apparent angle told me the cylinders were each about four meters tall and two meters wide. The cylinders were capped by transparent domes, through which we could occasionally make out one or both of the crew members. There were four holes in the heat shield, one under each cylinder, apparently for the rocket exhaust.

  The ships were tied “nose”-to-“nose” by a tether almost half a kilometer long, rotating every fifty seconds; at high magnification, it was like watching the second hand of a clock move. We expected to see that clock stop and watch the Norwegians dock, untether, undock, do their burns, rendezvous, redock, re-tether and, in what should be one of the dicier maneuvers in astronautics, reestablish their tethered rotation. I looked at the clock—they were seriously behind schedule if they were going to meet their window. Had something gone wrong already?

  Suddenly, one of the ships spouted fire for a couple of seconds. The acceleration was apparently much less than their centrifugal weight, because there was no sign of slack or vibration in the cable. Twenty-five seconds later the other ship also fired when its engines were pointed in the same direction as those of the first ship when it had fired. This went on for five cycles. Nothing wobbled, nothing broke. Mustaffa, as dumbfounded as I was, looked from the bridge video to me, and back again.

  I shook my head. I had no idea of how complex their internal procedures and checks were, but the operation viewed from outside was simple to the point of elegance—yet our engineers had justified management s position of not trying spin gravity by citing the complexity and uncertainty of doing such maneuvers. It was something that had never been done before with a manned spacecraft.

  Well, now it had—and that tight spot in my stomach that had materialized as soon as I heard of Halvorsen’s mission grew a little tighter. We were up against someone who did not live by the rules of managers, politicians, and tame engineers. He did not respect the zonas intangibles. He and his people could do things we could not. It wasn’t fair. I thought about Ingrid Karinsdatter. It was most definitely not fair.

  Midway to Mars, I was forced to hold a disciplinary hearing. Planetologist Kadir Ibn Muhunnad caught Sajag Kedar, our biotechnician, examining the Norwegian ships at maximum magnification, something that would have attracted no adverse notice except for the data he saved.

  I must explain. The Norwegian ships were still somewhat sunward of us and the Sun was in the plane of rotation of the tethered ships, plunging their domes into shadow for about ten seconds each revolution. During this time, glare vanished and one could see inside. The Norwegians seemed to use the dome for relaxation—as a Sun deck mostly—there were plants and acceleration couches, but almost no visible equipment.

  Whether Dr. Karinsdatter was aware of our surveillance, or whether she would have dressed more modestly even if she had been aware of it, is a matter of conjecture. Our telescopes were larger than those the Norwegians carried and I doubted that either of them had thought that we could observe them; we must have been just four very bright stars from their point of view But Halvorsen, who sent them to plague us? He might have thought of it. Oh, he might have.

  In one of Sajag’s five-second clips, Dr. Karinsdatter, alone on her couch, chanced to look through her bubble, across the megameter of space between us, through the optics and the electronics, from the view plate, and right into my eyes. It was obvious from what she was doing that she had no idea that anyone was looking back at her at such high resolution. Still, I felt taunted—and much more.

  “In my country, she could be shot for this,” Kadir told me—as he viewed the video evidence just as compulsively as everyone else. “It is her responsibility not to be seen in such a way.”

  Sajag was removed from the telescope schedule, but I am sure he was just the one who was careless enough to be caught. We all had access, and we all had times when we were the only ones awake on the ship. Several of us had valid reasons to be studying the Norwegian ships. We edited the logs after the hearing; common sense decrees that not everything be saved for posterity. Not only that, but we did not want to give Halvorsen the satisfaction of knowing what he’d done to us.

  The Norwegians gradually passed below us and drew away. Their midcourse maneuver had put them slightly ahead for now, and my hopes for getting permission for an autonomous catch-up burn were about nil. But I was sure I could slip a few more meters per second into the next scheduled one.

  Another month had passed. Mars became a small, reddish moon to our eyes, and in our telescope, we seemed to fly over its surface. The communications time lag was approaching its maximum of six and a half minutes. Soon Earth would pass sunward of us as we coasted uphill to our destination.

  We watched each other, we and the Norwegians. Officially, we pretended they did not exist. Unofficially, forty men envied Per Nordli more and more, and praised our mission plan less and less. We had a few heated arguments, and a broken nose in the Leonov.

  The Norwegians made no attempt to talk to us either. But time had not solved anything, and I had put off making my contingency plans too long. Our final midcourse maneuver was scheduled in two days and things would be too busy then, and too locked in concrete, to coordinate any trajectory changes with the Norwegians. I called Halvorsen.

  With almost six minutes between sender and receiver, one doesn’t wait for greetings before proceeding to business. After my testy preliminaries, I asked, “Can you at least tell me what kind of parking orbit they are going to try to achieve? We may be able to match inclinations. Over.”

  Hopefully time and a little conciliation would put the conversation on a professional basis. We needed to make plans and the communications round trip was eating up time.

  His eyebrows went up and a hint of a smile crossed his face. “Commander Lopez, I provided all of this data to Dr. Worthing and your mission control two months ago. Per and Ingrid are not going into a parking orbit. They plan to proceed directly to the surface. Parking orbit is a backup. Over.”

  “What?” With Halvorsen, I should not have made assumptions. He stared out of the screen at me as, somewhere deep inside me, a sense of doom started to form. I was dealing with a different kind of human being, a leader who dealt with the laws of nature directly, instead of through intermediaries. Everyone’s mission plans went to parking orbit—everyone’s except Halvorsen’s.

  History assaulted my mind when I saw his craggy, ancient face. Some recent—Halvorsen’s own incredible lunar south pole mission twenty years ago. But in the mists there were Amundsen, Nansen, and, of course, Leif Eriksson. As to why Dr. Worthing had not told us? He presumably feared what I might do to make up the time. He feared right.

  “Did you receive?” Halvorsen asked. “You are silent too long.”

  I had forgotten to say “over” and wasted six minutes. I shrugged my shoulders, and struggled for internal peace. I was not an inexperienced astronaut; I led explorations of several major lunar features and was second in command on the mission to the asteroid Eros, the trial for this mission. I’d had all the resources of the United Nations behind me. There was no reason for me to be flustered. But I sat there i
n front of the screen pickup open-mouthed.

  “Well,” he continued, “the whole thing I will run through while you figure out what you say. Ja, ten years ago I left the ISA Mars conference. We have already discussed why. Then I talked to our prime minister who nod-ded his head to some things and shook it to others. Our space program is a matter of national pride, ja, but it has to be a not-so-expensive program.

  “So, officially, I had the go-ahead to do a small Moon base. The Italians have one, the Tysker, the Nederlanders, even the Svensker!” Halvorsen scowled at this, and it was my turn to smile. If you look at the Scandinavian peninsula, you see not golden fields of Nordic brotherhood, but a line of tall mountains down its middle.

  “So our little single-stage-to-orbit Norgedraken flew ten missions and twice docked four payloads to big composite disks. Then we sent them both toward the Moon. You remember?”

  Very well, I remembered. It had been a fiasco. Both their seven-million-kroner base modules failed to make nominal Lunar Orbit Insertion burns and had whipped by the Moon out into interplanetary space. It had been such a loss to the minuscule Norwegian space program that observers thought that it would pretty much end the thing. But their parliamentary committee had met in closed session and voted more of their oil money for a second attempt.

  The old man’s face broke into the grin I would expect to see on the face of Satan himself when he acquires Halvorsen’s soul. “Well, our real plan that was not, nei, nor did anyone notice where the so-called Moon base modules went after they picked up a couple of kilometers per second rounding the Moon.” Halvorsen raised his eyebrows and I got a sinking feeling as I remembered that the date of the Norwegian Moon base “failure” was within a month of our own Mars supply staging mission.

  Halvorsen continued. “Everyone said Halvorsen screwed up. Ikke sandt? Not so? Well, we let them think that. Now I will put on the animation of our mission.” Halvorsen’s face was replaced by a cartoon of the “Moon” mission as he narrated. “The big disk was not just a docking structure, it was an aerobraking heat shield, which is how one should go to Mars. I say this to you ten years ago, but all your big rocket companies and everyone who wants to work for one someday say, ‘no, no, too risky.’ So you then buy lots of big rockets, ja? Well—”

  As the trajectory lines on the animation bent past Luna toward Mars, I forgot myself. I yelled at him despite the fact he hadn’t finished talking. “Halvorsen, damn you, we only bought five ARIES heavy-lift launch vehicles!” He wouldn’t hear that until I was well into regretting I said it, of course.

  “… Our ships have a mass ratio of seven and an exhaust velocity of three kilometers per second. That gets us to Mars fast, easy. We do some phasing pair burns to make sure we hit things right. Then we go right into the Martian atmosphere like the American Apollo returned to Earth, except we use negative lift to hold us down if there is not so much atmosphere where we come by. So, if air is thin, we skim the mountain tops and get at least capture, then hit our target on second pass, but if average, or more dense, we can land first pass. No matter. After we reach terminal velocity, we use rockets for the last half kilometer per second. The computers they need for this simple stuff weigh only a hundred grams now, so we take five each.

  “The supply ships were the trial run for the crew ship. They left two tiny satellites in egg-shaped half-Mars-day orbit with their high points at that latitude, good for communications relay and reconnaissance. Then they left four full fuel tanks in low orbit and landed on Mars to make more fuel for our return from carbon dioxide with their solar cells. This is not very efficient, but, with two years to do it, the ground base tanks are now full. This is simple, ja? Now Ingrid and Per will go to the bottom of Chryse, as you do, ikke sandt? But they will go straight down. Now—”

  My outburst about the heavy lift vehicles arrived then; I could hear my voice in the background. He frowned, then grinned. “Ja, well those big companies with the jobs, what did they build next?” He shook his head in exaggerated sympathy. “Back to Ingrid and Per. They can get themselves there and back with plenty of redundancies and no need for you to be concerned. Our ships we can park in Earth orbit and use again in two years. It is your super-complicated one-time mission about which you need be concerned. Over.”

  There was too much for me to digest, and no point in discussing things until I had.

  “I copy. Thank you for the information, Mr. Halvorsen. Over and out.”

  I signed off with mixed feelings. My Padre taught me to “not tempt the Lord by putting yourself where only He can rescue you.” Good advice in the cold scrublands of Patagonia, and good advice here. Despite Halvorsen’s contempt for conventional political and moral authority, the concepts of forethought, at least, were not foreign to him. “Plenty of redundancies,” he’d said. I would hope.

  In concept it was simple. Elegant. The ISA called it MSR, for Mars Surface Rendezvous, and dismissed it as too risky. At first, my mind boggled at a Mars surface refueling operation. But with everything tied down by Martian gravity, I realized it might actually be less tricky than a tank-module swap on Deimos. As I reviewed Halvorsen’s video, I realized the large spider legs on their supply modules placed the tanks higher than on the Amundsen and Fram, allowing a passive gravity feed. The compactness of their deceptively simple design impressed me— the same piece of mass often performed two or three functions.

  Their base was not too far from where we planned to land, so a rescue contingency would not perturb our mission plan very much. There were only two of them, and they already had their own supplies down. In fact, and this was the first time I remembered thinking in these terms, while their expedition was minuscule compared to ours, they had a lot of stuff for only two people.

  Halvorsen’s sign-off arrived as I was thinking it through. “Commander. What is now done is done, Mars will be a hard enough opponent, without false pride to fight as well. I tell this to Ingrid too. You should know she is in charge overall. She is the older, and has the broader education, and is a better English talker. Per is the best pilot and likes to do orbits and numbers mostly, though he can do the other too in a pinch. No matter. They do the job. If you meet my people, you will find Ingrid not so hard to work with.”

  I stared at the screen speechless, not believing what I’d heard. Halvorsen’s commitment to women’s equality was well known, and it was one of the many issues over which he had pulled out of the UN project. He felt an all male expedition, especially a large and long one, could become too restive, too grumbly, too combative. But third world politics had gone against him, and he had stomped out. Now he was having his revenge by decreeing that I would have to treat this woman, whose mores and deportment I had publicly criticized, as an equal.

  Not likely. It was far easier to simply ignore them, which is what we did for the next month, as we approached the Red Planet.

  Mars loomed bright and full as we rose toward it from the Sun. Our nuclear reactor shadow shields did double duty as we rode out a minor solar flare. In fact, it turned out that for the entire mission, the lowest total radiation dose was in the cabins right next to the reactor shield—because it stopped half the cosmic rays as well.

  We learned later that the Norwegian ships had superconducting magnetic loops that channeled the proton influx harmlessly into their heat shield, behind their propellant tanks. Another “unproven” technology, but not only did it protect the Norwegians, but they actually gained a few centimeters per second push from the interaction of the charged particle storm with their magnetic field.

  Little good would that do them! Doing midcourse maneuvers with our fleet is not trivial, but I found need for another one. I was a demon: I sold it to Dr. Worthing and pushed the planning through with two sets of books—the vector I intended to use would get us there a little earlier.

  Four countdowns had to go perfectly, everything forty people have spread around had to be stowed, four computers needed to agree on everything—it takes days of planning. But und
er my leadership it went perfectly, and it added just enough delta-V to get us back ahead of the Norwegians without creating big political problems for Mission Control.

  The “race,” of course, had assumed David and Goliath proportions in the Earth media, and guess who was cast as Goliath? I was obliged to do interviews in which I decried any competition and said conciliatory things about “my colleague, Dr. Karinsdatter.”

  When, as a result of our “nominal” and “planned” maneuver, we gradually pulled away from the Norwegians, the media cried foul. However, by that time, they could do nothing but throw words at us.

  Not so Halvorsen. I was in my cabin ten days before our Mars orbit injection when the Norwegians threw us yet another twist. We watched it on the telescope, recorded it, and I’m still not sure I believe it: the Norwegian ships separated without despinning! The one on the approaching leg of its rotation just let go of its tether, and its rotational velocity instantly became additional velocity toward Mars! It was like a stone released from an ancient sling, headed right toward my heart.

  I stared for five minutes, then played the file back again. “Give me the revised arrival times,” I finally told the computer.

  It was as bad as I feared. The lead ship, the Amundsen, had gained only about thirty meters per second, which would still leave it still more than a day behind us when we got to Mars. The trouble was that they were planning to go right down if they could, and we were going to do parking orbits, surveys, transfer to landers and so on, before actually going down. If all went right with both our plans, our first landings would take place within hours of each other—theirs first.

  I stared at the screen and composed my thoughts for the next call. It would not be my place to educate the ISA leaders under whose authority I commanded this expedition, but the experienced astronaut within me was saying that the Norwegians had a chance.