Girl on Mars (Girl on the Moon Book 2)

by Jack McDonald Burnett

  Conn couldn’t make Stoll see it. “Nobody cares what happens after we set foot on the planet,” he would say, and Conn gave up reminding him that what happened after that was very important to his son and two other astronauts. After a while she didn’t spend time worrying about it, though, because she doubted that they would make December anyway.

  Even a March, 2039 departure, as originally scheduled, was jeopardized on Christmas Eve, when Harold Barnes threw up his arms and stalked off the project.

  TEN

  Blindsided

  January, 2038

  The memorial service for the Sirius astronauts had been a numb, understated affair. Everyone was still in shock. As if to make up for that, Friday, January eighth, in Houston, a memorial was unveiled, and the reveal was even better-attended than the memorial service had been.

  The astronauts had among them been graduates of NASA training, ESA veterans, and contractors for Dyna-Tech and EMSpace, so a large and diverse group gathered in Houston. Jody Guidetti was there: Conn’s best friend from college. He was responsible for quality control for Dyna-Tech’s T-fields.

  They met for dinner. Conn picked a chain restaurant they both recognized, but Jody wanted to choose a place at random. Curious as to why, Conn went with him to Bennedetto’s, a tavern and grill some considerable distance from NASA operations.

  Jody seemed distracted for most of the meal. While they waited for coffee, he leaned in and said, in a low voice, “what does Barnes leaving do to your mission to Mars?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll go now, right?”

  Conn understood why Jody would think so. “I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of miles on me already. I might want to stick around and start an aerospace company. Plus, everybody will think I drove Barnes away to take his spot. I don’t need the headache.”

  “But your timetable. For leaving for Mars. When are you leaving?”

  Conn wondered what Jody’s interest was. “We were scheduled for December. Someone will have a whole lot of catching up to do. I don’t think we can make it. It would be better all around if we pushed it back to March again. Gives somebody a year to get ready.”

  “What if it’s you?”

  Conn shook her head. “I’m serious. About starting a company. But even if I were going, there are a dozen reasons why March is better than December. Stoll can hardly blame us for pushing the departure back when one of his astronauts has flown the coop.”

  “Conn, Dyna-Tech is sending an expedition to Mars. The hard way. It leaves in November.”

  “What? You mean, the hard way as in, seven, seven and a half months to get there?”

  “Yeah. They’re spooked about using those Pelorian computers anymore. They think—this is Yongpo thinking this, by the way—they think the Pelorians might have infected them with viruses. Keep us from using the tech.”

  “A virus that blows everything up?”

  “That’s the thought.”

  “Why were we OK?”

  “They didn’t know you were taking the spacecraft,” Jody said. “And I don’t think the Pelorians are interested in killing you, of all people.”

  Conn knew that the Pelorians had tried to pass off tech that didn’t work as the means for humankind to travel the fifth dimension. It took Yongpo’s genius to figure out how to make it work. They might sabotage tech they didn’t even want humans to have in the first place. Still, that was a lot to swallow.

  “But why Mars? What’s going on?”

  “I think they just want to set up one of those portals there. They’re avoiding the moon.” The Pelorians had a fortress on the far side of the moon. Especially if the Pelorians had destroyed their fifth-dimensional spacecraft, Dyna-Tech was smart to avoid the moon altogether.

  “So it works? The portal tech?”

  “Mostly,” Jody said. “They can’t get it to work without line-of-sight. The area between two portals has to be unobstructed. Something about plane geometry and the shape of space, I don’t know. Yongpo says we have to learn a lot more about the fifth dimension before we won’t need the portals to ‘see’ one another. In the meantime, using them to get from New York to Chicago is out, due to the curvature of the Earth.”

  “Still.” Conn was proud of Yongpo for getting it to work at all.

  “So they want to put a portal on one of the moons, probably Phobos, then another one on the surface.”

  “So when the Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun, they can’t use them for months?”

  “Right, but eventually, they want to build more portals—on asteroids, moons of Jupiter and Saturn, things like that. Set up a network that will let anybody hop anywhere in the solar system.”

  “And they’re leaving for Mars—wait. Why not in March, when there’s a window?”

  Jody made a sour face. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. They’re leaving in November because they want to beat you there.”

  # # #

  Stoll’s expedition should be scrapped. That was the obvious answer. Why should he spend more money, get somebody brand new to the crew ready, and hold everyone’s feet to the fire to achieve liftoff in December? Not only was Dyna-Tech going to beat him there, they were doing it the hard way. It was the Dyna-Tech astronauts that history would remember, not the two that showed up a month later.

  That wasn’t Stoll’s first thought. He thought they should leave in October, like he’d been saying all along. It wasn’t going to work any better now than it did before, though. December was the earliest the spacecraft would be ready.

  Naturally, Stoll tried to convince Conn to take Harold Barnes’ place on the crew. But she enjoyed her role on the project, and wasn’t sure she wanted to take a year and a half off from her life to travel to Mars and back, after losing a year and four months to the Aphelials.

  She was getting along great with both Ryan and Ginny Jones. But they had trained with Harold Barnes in isolation for ten days, testing their compatibility on a long expedition. The way the Saturn crew had trained. Conn might have made two great friends, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t strangle one another in close quarters for months at a time.

  Besides, Conn was pretty sure Ryan and Ginny had something going on. Fraternization was discouraged. The last thing the mission needed was a couple breaking up a month into the trip to Mars and hating each other for the next fifteen. But even if they didn’t run into any relationship difficulties, Conn would feel like a third wheel on a long voyage with two people who were together.

  To her surprise, the NSA wasn’t still spying on her. She didn’t think. She had expected it to start up again after she didn’t get the job at Dyna-Tech, no matter what the mousy young woman said. She would have expected it to start up again if she had gotten the job. But unless they were being more subtle—and that was one thing the NSA in 2038, during a supposed wartime, wasn’t—it didn’t feel like anyone was watching, listening to or following her. She was grateful.

  What Jody had told her about Dyna-Tech’s Mars mission was confidential, but once Conn knew it, she gleaned some other facts from contacts at the company, including Yongpo.

  They could leave so soon because they were repurposing Conn’s command module and lander from her second mission to the moon. She didn’t envy whoever had to travel thirty-two weeks in a ten-by-ten-by-eight CM with two other people. Maybe they would expand it. Her mission’s own spacecraft would be big enough for some actual privacy.

  The astronauts involved would be the Roscosmos-trained Sergei Dzagoev, a NASA-trained astronaut about Conn’s age named Isabella De Maria, and Scott Daniels. Daniels and Conn had been together for a while, and had gone to the moon together. It didn’t work out (the relationship, the moon mission went fine), and afterward, Conn learned that he had tried to strand her on the moon and thereby kill her so she wouldn’t screw up the US government’s plans to manufacture a war against the Pelorians. To say they had a history understated things.

  Daniels’ presence on
the crew made Conn suspect that the NSA, or some other initialed agency in the US government, was in on the mission. She wondered what was in it for them.

  Other than continuing to insist that the departure be moved up to October, and continuing to try to talk Conn into taking Harold Barnes’ place, Stoll was business as usual. Conn continued to train Ryan and Ginny, who added their voices to Stoll’s, urging Conn to come on the mission with them. Conn had called some potential replacements for Barnes, but hadn’t nailed anybody down yet.

  The business-as-usual act got stale after a couple weeks, and as March approached, Conn sat Stoll down to gauge his level of commitment once again. Before she kept working everybody so hard, she wanted to be sure that he was really prepared to send his son and two other astronauts, one of whom was still unknown, all the way to Mars to come in second.

  “I still say it can be done,” he said, without conviction.

  “It can’t,” Conn said. “Dyna-Tech is going to beat you there. Unless you’re morbid enough to hope that the Dyna-Tech mission fails, you’re not going to have the first successful Mars expedition. No one wishes that wasn’t true more than me.”

  “You know what?” Stoll said, reddening. “I’m sick and tired of being told what can’t be done. There’s a way. We just haven’t found it yet.”

  Conn reminded him that they continued to look, to try to find a way to leave or arrive earlier. No one was sitting down on the job.

  “It’s paralysis by analysis,” Stoll said. “Everyone’s thinking about it, to make it look like they’re doing something. Well, doing something means you stop thinking about it after a while.

  “I’m done thinking about it. Here’s what I’m doing: the mission is off. You all win.”

  ELEVEN

  How To

  February, 2038

  So that was it. Conn’s job was done—and she wouldn’t see any return on her monetary investment in the expedition, either. She didn’t feel any better about this than she expected to. It wasn’t the money—it was the sense of purpose, it was feeling vital and important again.

  She held off letting everybody know. She wasn’t sure why. Stoll told his son, who broke the news to Ginny. But Conn didn’t tell the logistics people, the science people, the sales people, the people building the spacecraft—not a word. It was Stoll’s responsibility, not hers. She knew though that Stoll expected her to do it.

  Ryan and Ginny both took it hard, and sought Conn out. Conn asked them not to tell anybody yet, either.

  She huddled up with Liam, whose last name she couldn’t remember, one of the people responsible for logistics. She swore him to secrecy. She wanted to go over some scenarios with him.

  She trusted these people when they said the earliest the expedition would be ready to go would be December. That squared with what the people building the spacecraft were saying. So, December. A month or more after the Dyna-Tech mission would launch.

  She wondered whether there was a way to get there quicker—shave a month or more off the journey.

  “You’ve considered going to Venus first, right? Using its gravity?” If Dyna-Tech were going on a plain-vanilla route, and there was no reason they wouldn’t, then they would sling themselves around the moon to get a speed boost on the way to Mars. They would travel about 115 million kilometers.

  The speed boost from Venus would be considerably greater. But of course, Venus was much farther away—in the wrong direction.

  Or was it?

  “Distance to Venus is closing in early 2039,” Liam reported. “We would have to go, let’s see: sixty million kilometers to get there, leaving in December.”

  “Where is Mars in relation to Venus at the time?”

  “Distance also closing.” Liam swiped at his computer. “Ninety-two million kilometers.” When Mars and Venus were on the same side of the sun, and Earth was off somewhere else, it could be a shorter distance between Venus and Mars than between Earth and Mars.

  “This whole thing is crazy,” Conn said. “Their route, whatever our route is—if we all just waited until March, look, it would be less than a seventy-five million-kilometer trip directly to Mars.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Liam said. “We’ve been trying to convince Stoll of that for weeks.”

  “So, what’s the case against going to Venus first?”

  “Well, the speed boost you get, it’s so powerful, that even braking on the way you would be coming in awfully fast,” Liam said. “Better chance that you’ll get to Mars and then just keep going.” He swiped and showed Conn an animation of what he described.

  “You can mitigate the speed somewhat by slinging around Venus at a higher orbit, though. And it would be a dangerous insertion, but not impossible. Look.” Conn swiped a few times. In her animation the spacecraft went to Venus, orbited it twice at a higher orbit than Liam had used, then slung its way out to Mars. When it got to the red planet … it burned up in the Martian atmosphere, killing everyone aboard.

  “I still say it’s not impossible,” Conn grumbled. “Can’t we eddy-current brake for longer so we don’t come into Mars too hot?” The spacecraft would use currents generated from the sun’s magnetic field to create its own magnetic force in the opposite direction, slowing it down as it approached Mars.

  “You can eddy-current brake your whole way to Mars, if you want,” Liam said. “You just won’t beat Dyna-Tech there. Look, we can find the right numbers to make it happen here,” Liam said, pointing to his computer screen. “But on a journey that long there are going to be course corrections, and the farther out you get the less set-in-stone the numbers I come up with are. There would be almost no margin for error.”

  “What if,” Conn said, swiping away, “we approach from this side. We intersect with the orbit of Phobos.” One of Mars’ moons, the larger one. “We use Phobos’ gravity to slow us down just a little bit more.”

  “Phobos doesn’t have much gravity. It’s tiny.”

  “It has some,” Conn countered.

  “We’d have to brake exactly the right amount of time on the way there . . . ” Liam said.

  “Right. And really, it’s not a given we would burn up—we might just miss and keep going.” She grinned at him. “Eventually we could turn around and get back, we just then definitely wouldn’t get there before Dyna-Tech. But nobody dies.” This wasn’t necessarily true, and Conn (and Liam) knew it. Missing Mars and hurtling deeper into the solar system was not an attractive alternative.

  “Yeah,” Liam said, playing along, “but that adds to the days you need to be kept alive, the fuel you use—you would have to plan for that, carry more fuel and supplies. Which makes you even harder to stop.”

  Conn looked at Liam.

  “What?”

  She blinked. “I’ve got it. I’ve got how we can do it.”

  # # #

  Stoll wasn’t stalking the project area like a panther anymore now that he was out, so Conn called him. She told him they had figured out how to leave in December, but still arrive at the same time as the Dyna-Tech expedition, plus or minus. He didn’t seem interested.

  “I knew it could be done,” he spat. “But what’s done is done, Conn. I’m out. I don’t make decisions like that lightly, and I don’t go back on them.”

  “Out of pride? You’re going to keep your son from potentially being the first man on Mars because you made a knee-jerk decision and are too proud to go back on it?”

  “I told you I don’t make decisions like that lightly,” Stoll said. “I didn’t pull the plug because we couldn’t get there first, I pulled it because everybody kept telling me we couldn’t do it, instead of figuring it out. That hasn’t changed—the kind of people working on the project, they’re all still there.”

  “Don’t blame them for considering astronaut safety above all else,” Conn said. “As a former astronaut, I know that if I didn’t have people like that watching my back, I wouldn’t have gotten into my first rocket.”

  “There’s staying
alive, Conn, and there’s living. Your solution, the one you just told me about—it risks astronauts’ lives. But it might make history. Isn’t that why you want to do it?”

  “I believe they can get there safely, and back safely. Otherwise I wouldn’t be recommending it.”

  “Well, they’re not going to get there safely, because they’re not going. Is there anything else you need to speak to me about?”

  Conn sighed. She looked up, and then squinted her eyes shut. She asked Stoll, would he mind if she financed the rest of the mission. And went in Harold Barnes’ place.

  # # #

  Everyone associated with the project was delighted that Conn was taking over. All the people who hadn’t known how close they’d come to not going at all now counted their blessings. Ryan and Ginny grinned and told her they knew all along she would be going with them. Her financing the rest of the expedition was a surprise, though.

  “Don’t get too excited just yet,” Conn warned them. “What we’re going to try and do is dangerous. In fact, I’m not letting you guys go unless you fully understand and agree.”

  “Does it get us there before Dyna-Tech?” Ryan asked.

  “Probably. It’ll be close.”

  “Then we’re for it.” He looked at Ginny, who nodded enthusiastically.

  “That’s great, but I need informed consent. Come with me to the logistics cubes.”

  They went, and Conn showed them what the flight plan looked like. To Venus, around Venus, to Mars, brake on the way, use the atmosphere and the flimsy Phobos gravity to slow down more, orbit Mars.

  “The amount of time you say this is going to take seems way off, to me,” Ginny said.