Mars Crossing

by Geoffrey A. Landis

  But now the two days were over, and he was no closer to an idea of what to do than when he’d started.

  They would die if they stayed.

  There really wasn’t a choice. Desperate and stupid as the idea was, it was their only chance. They had to go.

  He let nothing of his feelings show when he called the crew together.

  “Engineer Martin has explained his plan to you,” he said. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that it’s going to be easy; it’s not. It’s a tough haul, and it’s not clear whether it’s even possible at all.

  “You have discussed it among yourselves. Ryan has come up with some refinements of his plan, but before we go any further, I want to hear from you. All I want from you is one single word. Do we accept his plan or not? Yes or no.

  “Martin, we know your opinion. Doctor Jackson?”

  Tana nodded.

  “Say it,” Radkowski said.

  “It’s our only chance.”

  “I take that for yes. Ms. Conselheiro?”

  Her eyes were shadowed. “We die here. I don’t like that choice.”

  “Your vote?”

  “I vote to live.”

  “Mr. Whitman?”

  “I haven’t heard any better of a choice, have you? Hell, let’s stomp.”

  Radkowski nodded. The decision was made, and they had bought into it. He didn’t even have to vote himself.

  Under the circumstances, that was the best he could hope for.

  “Then it’s decided,” he said. “Get yourselves ready. We leave tomorrow at first light.”

  26

  AFRICA

  There is a visceral feeling to piloting a jet fighter that can never quite be described. It is a feeling of power and of control, of riding a bestial strength tamed just barely enough to respond with fury to your least suggestion of stick pressure. John Radkowski would never admit it, but if there had ever been a choice between the two, he would rather fly than have sex. In its way, piloting the F-22 fighter was better than sex.

  Two years at the Eastthorpe Military Academy, paid for by his brother’s drug dealing, and four years of ROTC at New York University had changed Johnny Radkowski. He was no longer the rebellious punk from the projects. He had learned caution and discipline. His classmates admired him, but none of them were particularly close to him.

  He’s got the killer instinct, his Air Force flight instructor wrote in his recommendation for him to move on to train on fighters. He was not, in actual point of fact, a spectacularly good pilot; he was more than competent, but he would never reach that mystic fusion of the machine with his own nervous system, the unity with the machine that marks the very best pilots. But what he lacked in finesse, he made up for in sheer determination. The kid has guts, his flight instructor wrote.

  So John Radkowski, bad boy from the bad side of Queens, became a fighter pilot. A year later he was flying fighter escort for the relief missions in Africa.

  It was a stupid, dirty little war, or rather, a tangled matrix of wars, all linked together in hard-to-understand ways. Nobody in the fighter corps really knew what they were fighting for, or why.

  “We’re talking a mix of colonialism, neocolonialism, tribalism, religious conflicts, foreign troops, modern weapons, economic decline, political aspirations, international debts, racism, nationalism and pan-nationalism,” the briefing officer had told them, before they had first shipped out for Africa.

  He was reading from a list that had been prepared in a book. “Don’t even try to understand it. We’ve got a job to do, and we’re going to do the best we can.”

  That evening he had been flying escort for a bomber. Columns of greasy black smoke rose from burning rebel camps like signal fires to reticulate the African sky. However many camps, or purported camps, they had bombed, there were always more.

  The African unification wars were going badly for all sides.

  He had been enjoying the flying, coming back from a run over territory that had been cleared as friendly. He was not paying any attention to anything in particular when an antique Russian heatseeking SAM leaped away from a crag below and homed in on his wingman. He cued his mike. “Bravo, Alpha, looks like you’ve picked up a hitchhiker.”

  A laconic reply. “I got him.” The jet next to him hit afterburners and rocketed upward, trailing flame. The missile, outclassed, fell away and then curved off to crash somewhere distant in the African twilight.

  By luck, Radkowski had been looking in the right direction and had gotten a good fix on the hilltop the missile had come from. He made a wide turn and came back around and down, holding close to the treetops and then pulling up into position to rake the mountaintop with cannon fire. He cued his mike. “I’m gonna teach the bastards a brief lesson,” he said.

  “Teach ’em good, Radko,” his wingman replied.

  Only at the last minute did he see the face in his sights, a boy who could not have been any older than nine, frightened and alone, the empty missile launcher discarded at his feet. And then his cannon fire blew apart the hilltop, and the face disappeared into smoke and rock dust.

  The face continued to haunt his nights for years.

  After that night, he put in a transfer to fly evacuation transports. It was a lower prestige job, and the word that spread in the fighter squadron was that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody said that to his face, though.

  Flying evacuation was better. He could at least pretend that he was helping people, ferrying endless planeloads of refugees, pencil-thin and nearly naked, each one carrying all of their belongings held wrapped up in a cloth or in a molded plastic basket balanced precariously on his head. The refugee camps outside Bangalore were not paradise, but they were better than the war zone. He could tell himself that he was saving lives.

  It was no safer than flying fighters, and already he had been hit twice. The first one was a lucky rifle shot from the ground that had penetrated the transport’s sheet-metal skin right between his feet and ricocheted around the cabin. It had shattered the glass on his instruments, but done no actual damage. The second hit was from a surface-to-air missile that had detonated close enough to rip his right aileron to shreds. Despite the loss of control, he had babied the transport down to a flawless landing right on the numbers at the Diego Garcia airfield. After that, with no injuries from either hit, his ground crew started called him by a new nickname: Lucky Radkowski.

  The third time he was not so lucky. Taking advantage of heavy cloud cover to hide from watching satellites, the Splinter faction of the Unification Army had set up an antiaircraft battery on the coast, in the mistaken belief that the evacuation transports were French bombers supporting the rebel Ugandan Liberation Front. The evacuation fleet flew right over it. Stoddart, on his left, took a hit dead center. Ritchmann, on his right, took fire that ripped off his left wing, and fell, in pieces, to the beach. Radkowski’s luck still held. The first SAM hit took out his outboard left engine and half his fuel. The second took out both his right engines.

  Leaking oil and fuel, there was no way he could make the base at Diego Garcia on his one remaining engine. He broke radio silence—little point in it, now. “November seven two niner to base, two niner to base. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. I’m hit.”

  “Copy, November seven two niner. Can you make it as far as Mahajanga?”

  “Will try.” He checked the charts, although he had memorized them long ago. Madagascar, if not friendly territory, at least was noncombatant.

  He coaxed the damaged bird as far as he could, but even Madagascar turned out to be too much to hope. He ditched over open ocean.

  The last thing he remembered, as the dark water came up like a fist to meet the airplane, was a fierce joy. It is over, he thought. My debt is paid. And then, immediately after, he remembered the refugees he was carrying, and thought, no! They have nobody. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, he thought, to keep thee in all thy ways.

  And then the water hit, and the airplane broke apart and sa
nk.

  Later, they said he was a hero. They said that he saved half the refugees.

  He had been clinging to a shred of floating wreckage for over five hours when the rescue helicopter pulled him out of the water, in shock, bleeding, and semiconscious from blood loss and exposure. A shark had bitten off half his hand, and then apparently found other food in the wreckage. He didn’t even remember it.

  Post-traumatic amnesia, the medical examiners told him. Don’t worry about it. Maybe the memories would surface later.

  Maybe they wouldn’t.

  He had already been accepted into the astronaut corps. The evacuation had been his last mission in Africa.

  27

  STATION T-R-E-V

  Hello, Earth! Hello, stompers and rats and all the hominid life-forms on that big fuzzy ball we call home. This is Trevor Whitman, station T-R-E-V, your intrepid reporter, calling in from the pink planet, Mars.

  “This is taped, but Commander Radkowski assures me that he’ll put it up to play to Earth over the low-gain antenna overnight, so you’ll be hearing this tomorrow, I guess. Anyway, tomorrow our time, that is!

  “I’m sure you’re all watching our epic trek across the red desert back there. Mars is after us big time, but we’re not dead yet. I’m reporting in That we’ve got a tough goal of a hundred and fifty miles to cover on day one of our epic adventure, and we’re raring to get going.

  “Uh, I guess Commander Radkowski has told you that we’re not going to be receiving your broadcasts once we start moving, so I won’t be answering mail this time. Something to do with the high-gain antenna back at the Don Quijote. I don’t know the technical stuff; I guess the commander told you all that stuff anyway, right? I have to admit here that I guess I sort of slept through some of the lectures about communications links and bandwidth and all that techno stuff. Anyway, I’m not receiving right now, but just keep those questions coming, right, and I guess they’ll forward them on to me when we get the communications from Earth back up.

  “Uh, it’s been a great trip so far—I can tell you that for certain, once we get moving we are going to be seeing more of Mars than any other humans in history. I mean, that’s going to be some kind of record. It’s real big, there’s a lot of Mars to see, and they tell me just wait, it gets better.

  “So stay tuned, okay? Don’t forget about us up here.

  “So this is Trevor Whitman, your main man on Mars, signing off.

  “Bye, Earth!

  “Okay, that’s it. Okay, Earth? Mission control? Is there a mission control out there? Okay, don’t broadcast this part, okay? Look, things out here aren’t real good. I don’t know, but I think we’re in trouble. We need a rescue ship here, okay? Look, the commander tells me that it’s impossible, there isn’t enough time, but don’t listen to him, okay? Just send a rescue ship. We need a rescue ship. I don’t believe it when he says you won’t do it. Look, we’re going to die up here, and that’s going to be, like, major bad publicity, and you can count on that. Big-time bad publicity. So send help.

  “Send help.

  “Help.

  “Please?”

  PART TWO

  ESTRELA CONSELHEIRO

  The destruction and abandonment of the ship was no sudden shock. The disaster had been looming ahead for many months, and I had studied my plans for all contingencies a hundred times…The task now was to secure the safety of the party, and to that I must bend my energies and mental powers and apply every bit of knowledge that experience of the Antarctic had given me. The task was likely to be long and strenuous, and an ordered mind and a clear program were essential if we were to come through without loss of life…

  —Ernest Shackelton,

  South (1919)

  Our nature lies in movement. Complete calm is death.

  —Blaise Pascal

  1

  NIGHT

  Estrela would never tell it to other members of the crew, but the nightmares were coming again. In the middle of the night she would be alone, huddling in the dark, terror squeezing her ribs, afraid to breathe or move or make a sound. The purple afterimage of rifle fire faded away from her eyes and the urine stink of fear clogged her nostrils, far more real and more vivid than the smells of the ship or the sounds of the sleeping crew or the whir of the air circulation fans. Her ears straining at the darkness for sounds that she hoped she would never again hear.

  She didn’t know why she was alive.

  João had been the only one who could take the nightmares away, and João was dead. She clung to his memory, the one real thing she knew, and refused to cry.

  They were going to die.

  2

  JOURNEY

  The journey started before dawn.

  Estrela and Ryan set out first to scout the terrain ahead of them on the two dirt-rovers, heading north and east from the landing site. The dirt-rovers were laden down with supplies: spare zirconia cells, bubble tents, fuel cells and solar arrays, repair tools and extra parts for the dirt-rovers along with a spare thermophotovoltaic isotope generator, superfiber cable and a winch and pitons, water, and fifty days’ supply of the highly condensed and nearly tasteless bricks of food that the astronauts referred to as Purina Human Chow. The main supplies for the expedition would be carried on the rockhopper, of course, but they had loaded up the dirt-rovers to the limits of their carrying capacity in order to haul the maximum amount of support equipment on the expedition north. Their survival, they all knew, would depend on their forethought in bringing with them the equipment that they needed.

  Northward and eastward.

  The ground was smooth, easy traveling even for the overloaded little dirt-rovers, and as they moved the dust hung in the still air behind them like a pale yellow fog. They were traveling in a flat-floored valley between parallel ridges on either side.

  The predawn light was orangish red. Ryan had intended to take the point position, with Estrela following, but she had quickly grown annoyed with his pace and took the lead without asking.

  “Don’t get too far ahead,” he radioed to her.

  “Relax,” she said. “No problem.”

  A few kilometers down the trail, Ryan stopped his dirt-rover atop a small rise and got off. He had told himself that he would not look back, but after five minutes, he couldn’t help himself. Don Quijote stood on the side of a small dune, surrounded by the deflated airbags and tilted at a drunken angle, looking as if it would topple over at any moment. Behind her in the distance was Dulcinea. From here, it was impossible to guess that anything was wrong.

  It looked so forlorn. He knew that he would never see them again. He had a sudden urge to turn back, that there must be some way to fix the problem, but he knew it was impossible.

  Ryan got back on his dirt-rover and started the engine. The next time he looked back he was ten kilometers away, and the Don Quijote had disappeared over the horizon. There was nothing but gentle undulations of sand stretching as far as he could see.

  Estrela’s dirt-rover had vanished ahead of him, but he could tell where she was by the plume of dust hanging in the air. He concentrated on following the tracks of her rover, distinct enough in the sand to follow easily. From time to time her voice would come in over the radio to remark on a possible obstacle or an interesting landmark, but for the most part they rode in silence.

  The flatness of the terrain was broken by the occasional crater. At first he detoured around them, but after a while he saw that Estrela’s tracks didn’t deviate at all, and he started following. Up, teeter at the crest, and then down like a roller coaster to the flat, sand-covered bottom, then again at the other side.

  During the drive, he mulled over their situation. Slowly, he began to convince himself that it might not be as bad as he’d thought. The Brazilians had surely put some margins of safety into their return ship. Engineers always plan for a worst case. If they would shave every single ounce of excess weight and rely on using up all of the safety margin, it was quite likely that they would be able to f
ly five back on the Jesus do Sul. He would work the numbers again as soon as he got a chance. He had been right, he told himself, not to alarm the crew by bringing up the problem of who should return. Hell, it would be a jinx to dwell on the possibility, but it was not out of the question that one of them might die on the trip north. It would be a tragedy, but surely the Jesus do Sul would be able to launch four. Four might be no problem at all.

  “Rover one, Radkowski,” Commander Radkowski’s voice came over the radio. “Anything to report?”

  Ryan slowed down and cued his radio. “The way has been fine,” he said. “Mostly compacted sand. A few rocky outcroppings and some boulders, but nothing we haven’t been able to go around.”

  “Got it. Okay, we’ve packed up here and we’re setting out. Stay in touch.”

  Behind them, the rockhopper set out.

  3

  RIDING THE ROCKHOPPER

  At first Trevor found it exciting. All through the morning, there were constantly new vistas, every mile a new planet, fresh and exciting. The occasional dry voice of Ryan or, less often, Estrela, broke in on the radio to apprise them of landmarks ahead. The six-wheel suspension kept the rockhopper level, and it moved over the sand with a motion more like a boat than a wheeled vehicle.

  For Trevor, the drive was disconcerting. It continually seemed to him that they had made a mistake, that they had circled around and were heading south, instead of north. He would look at the inertial guidance readout on the rockhopper’s console, and think, That’s wrong. We’re going the wrong way. But then he would look at the sun, and realize, no we’re going the right way. And then the entire planet would seem to spin around him for a moment until he was reoriented.

  Mars confused his sense of direction.