But Ryan barely looked at her, although she tried in a dozen subtle ways to contrive to be there, nearly naked, when he was in the habitat, and he would hardly have been able to miss her. But he never made a move.
Ryan was good-looking. Oh, not as good as João—Santa Luzia, who could possibly be as gorgeous as her beautiful João had been?—but he was fine. But he seemed to pay no attention to her.
Two women, and only one would get to go with him back home. Well, the odds were much better than they had been. She knew men, and knew that if there had been two men, somehow the men would have contrived a way to show that it was logical for the two men to go home to Earth and the women stay behind to die. It was just the way of the world.
She wondered if Tana knew how much she hated her.
9
THE CANADIAN ASTRONAUT
At SPAR Aerospace, Ryan Martin worked on designing tether deployment systems for space; much later, his expertise on the use of tether systems played a major part in his role in the failed Mirusha rescue attempt. He spent a year in France, to earn a degree in space studies at the International Space University in Strasbourg, and the day he came back to Canada he put in his application to join the small Canadian astronaut corps.
His application went in just in time to apply to join the first Canadian cadre selected specifically for duty to the space station. His low amount of piloting time counted against him. He had taken flying lessons and spent as much time as he could afford practicing, but he certainly had far fewer hours in the air than the RCAF pilots that applied for the same few slots. But no one had a more thorough grasp of every aspect of astronautics and microgravity science than he, and in the end that counted more than his relative lack of flight hours. He wasn't being trained to be a pilot anyway; the Americans would never select a Canadian to fly their shuttle. For the tasks Canada wanted astronauts for, they needed expertise in all areas, and no one scored higher than Ryan.
He graduated at the top of his astronaut training class.
His appointment to the astronaut corps elicited mixed feelings for him; during those years the fate of the space station was uncertain, and whether the space station had any role at all in the future exploration of space, or if instead it was an expensive orbiting dinosaur, was quite unclear. He wondered if the real future might instead lie in commercial space, where new, small launch vehicles were beginning to make enormous profits from launching tiny, cheap satellites.
But he wanted to do more than just send up other people's satellites.
Ryan Martin wanted to go to Mars.
Mars was his obsession. He thought about Mars, made calculations, read every book, science or science fiction, that had ever been written about Mars, published papers suggesting possible solutions to the finicky engineering details of a Mars mission. After a while he started to be invited to give lectures about Mars missions, and he found that he was good at it. He would rent an airplane and fly to some distant city and talk. Schoolchildren, Masonic temples, library groups—he loved the moment when a group of strangers suddenly warmed up, and his contagious enthusiasm spread.
He didn't chase women—to tell the truth, he had never learned how to approach a woman—it seemed to be an arcane trick that other men learned in some class he had failed to attend—and so he treated all the women he met exactly the same way he treated the men: as coworkers or as friends. But occasionally women would ask him out, and he wasn't against going out to a restaurant, or to a concert, or for a walk on the beaches of Lake Ontario. And afterward, if sometimes a female friend asked him back to her apartment, or his, well, he had taken no vow of chastity.
He had only two rules to his relationships, rules that he never broke. Never promise anything.
And never fall in love.
10
RIDING THE SLINGSHOT
Butterfly had been designed for short hops and aerial reconnaissance, not for a two-thousand-mile flight, and it had not been designed to carry three people. Over the months that they spent at Acidalia, Ryan ripped out every part that was not critical to flight: all the redundant control systems, the scientific instrumentation. He cut off the landing gear; when she landed, the Butterfly would land on snow. And she would never take off again.
They would have no margin, but at last he had an airplane that would make it to the pole.
For the take-off, Ryan laid down two strands of the superfiber cable for three kilometers along the desert sand. At the far end he staked it down to bolts drilled into bedrock, and then went back and used the motorized winch to stretch it. The elastic energy that can be stored in superfiber is enormous: If it were to suddenly break, the release would snap the cable back at almost hypersonic velocity, setting free enough energy to vaporize much of the cable, as well as anybody who stood nearby.
Once he had it stretched, he held it stretched with a second anchor bolt. It formed a two-mile-long rubber band. Ryan would use the world's largest slingshot to launch the airplane.
The airplane had only two seats, so Estrela and Tana both were crammed into the rear copilot's seat of the airplane, Estrela perched on Tana's lap. In their bulky Mars suits, they fit into the space with barely millimeters to spare.
Ryan closed and sealed the cockpit around them and took the pilot's seat.
"Ready?" Ryan asked.
"As ready as we're going to be," Tana's muffled voice said.
"Get on with it!" Estrela said.
"Armed," Ryan said. He pulled out an arming switch on the remote control, and said, "Launch!"
The explosives fired in silence, but Ryan could see the flash behind him, severing the strap that held the stretched superfiber down. Instantly he was pressed back into his seat as the superfiber slingshot, attached to the airplane at the motor mount, grabbed the airplane and shot it forward. Behind him he heard Tana say "Yikes!" and Estrela let out a sudden grunt as the sudden weight pressed into her.
The ground rushed past them with terrifying speed. Ryan concentrated his attention on keeping the wings level; with even a slight brush of a wingtip against the sand the fragile airplane would disintegrate around them. He couldn't spare any attention for the airspeed indicator, but he could feel the wings beginning to pull against the air. He held forward pressure on the stick to keep the nose down; they needed to reach flying airspeed as quickly as they could. He shot a glance down at the airspeed; not yet, not yet. Now.
He eased back on the stick—not too much, or the wings would be ripped off—and the ground dropped away under them. Now Butterfly was lofted like a kite being towed behind a running boy. The pressure from the slingshot eased off; they were running out of stretch. It had been only a few seconds. He concentrated on keeping his airspeed up while milking the last little bit of altitude out of the quickly relaxing slingshot.
The slingshot slackened and fell away. For a moment Butterfly was soaring. He commanded the valves on the liquid oxygen tanks open, armed the ignition switch, and watched for the green light. After a terrifying pause, it flickered on.
They were ready.
Ryan hit the ignition button, and with a shudder, the ram-rocket chuffed to life.
For the first time in weeks, Ryan felt a surge of hope. Maybe they would make it after all. They were flying. Flying!
11
MOMENTUM MANAGEMENT
Other astronauts who flew up on the shuttle with him felt sick. Ryan felt exhilarated. Every part of it was exciting, the training, the launch, and now the free-fall. This was what he'd always wanted. He tried a slow flip, then a fast one. "This is great," he said.
But he was here to work, not to play. He had the map of the space station memorized. The others went quickly to find the station physician, or at least to find vomit bags. "They'll get over it in a day or so," the station physician said. "How about you? You okay? Need a patch?"
"No. I'm fine."
The doctor nodded. Ryan was fascinated to see how his body moved infinitesimally in the opposite direction as he did. "Some peo
ple aren't affected. Guess you're lucky."
He went to work.
After a while, when he was alone in a module, one of the female astronauts floated over. She casually snagged a handrail next to him, and looked at him, floating upside down.
He looked up.
"Are you gay?" she said.
"Huh? No." He tried to remember her name. He was supposed to know the names of all the people on the station, but he'd never been good with names. Britta, he recalled, Britta Silverthorne. That was it.
"Nothing wrong if you are," she said.
"Nope, nothing wrong if I were," he agreed. "Happens I'm not."
"Oh. That's okay; I just wanted to know."
He waited, saying nothing.
She rotated herself over until she reoriented so that her head pointed the same way he did. "That's better. Now I can look at you," she said. "Say, you're better in microgravity than any other newbie I've seen. You must have been upside before?"
"Nope," he said, "first time." And then, "I think I like it."
"I'm impressed. You're a natural."
There was a pause.
"You did get the orientation, didn't you?" Britta asked. "You know about our first-night custom here? The welcome-aboard ritual?"
Ryan considered her. She was cute, in her way. She had a round face, with short dark hair and deep brown eyes; her rather baggy coveralls failed to conceal a body that was compact and fit. He knew about the space station's rite of jus primae noctis, of course; there was no way to avoid it. The other astronauts—the male ones, anyway—had made sure about that, with a lot of ribald comments and pointed innuendo. But it was not his way of dealing with the people. "Sure."
She paused, licked her lips nervously, and looked at him sidelong. She was blushing. "You want to?"
He looked at her calmly. "Are you asking?"
She looked away. "I'm not supposed to ask."
"Are you?"
"Well, damn it, yes. Yes."
"Well, then," he said, "sure."
It was sweet and complicated, almost like an exercise in momentum management. And it was slow, so slow. Whenever he tried to be hasty, he pushed her away from him, and she would say, "Slow, keep it slow and easy." Afterward, she clung to him, and in a few moments he realized, somewhat to his amazement, that he wanted to do it again.
And sometime after that, she kissed him on the nose. As she drew her coveralls back on, she said, "I'm pleased to be able to say that you are now a member of the microgravity society." Then she smiled, and said, "Very definitely pleased."
For the first few weeks Ryan was assigned to momentum management. This meant two things: garbage dump detail, and processing wastewater into fuel for the resistojet thrusters. He used the garbage dump as a chance to experiment with the tether, trying swinging deploys, crack-the-whip deploys, getting a feel for the tether system.
"You actually like garbage detail, don't you?" one of the astronauts said, incredulous. "You spend more time working on the garbage drop calculations—everybody else just reads out the computer and plops the answer into the drop parameters."
"One day we're going to use a tether on the way to Mars," Ryan said. "I'm getting ready."
The other astronaut shook his head. "You sure are," he said. "You sure are."
12
BUTTERFLY IN A HURRICANE
Mars looked different from above.
Ryan flew fast and low. He had to stay low, with the Butterfly so overloaded, he had to stay in the densest part of the tenuous atmosphere to fly at all. Still, the view was remarkable. From above, it was clear that they were following the coastline of an ancient sea. To the east, a jumble of mountains and chaos interrupted by ancient riverbeds flowing down to a beach. To the west, a flat and smooth basin, broken by craters.
Tana pressed against the cockpit window, enrapt. She turned forward to point out something to Estrela, to ask about a massif that loomed on the horizon, and with astonishment saw that Estrela had her eyes closed. She was asleep.
Asleep, through this greatest airplane trip ever taken!
As the liquid oxygen burned off, the airplane gradually lightened, and Ryan slowly gained attitude. "No such thing as an airplane that flies itself," Ryan's flight instructor had told him, long ago, and on another planet. "You have to be alert every second. The moment you think that the computer is going to do the flying, the moment you think you can relax and stop paying attention, that's when you're going to screw up. That's when pilots die."
Butterfly came as close to flying itself as any airplane ever did. Once the take-off had been completed, Ryan could have taken his hands off the controls and let the autopilot take over. They were heading due north.
The land below had been shaped and reshaped by enormous impact craters and by vast lava flows. As they continued northward, Ryan noticed odd craters with a peculiar, melted look, as if the impacting meteoroid had splashed into thick ice cream.
The first of the three liquid oxygen tanks was sputtering, nearly empty. Ryan opened the valve to start feeding from the second tank, and felt the engine surge with the increased fuel flow. He diverted boil-off gas through the first tank to blow the last of the oxygen out, and then, satisfied that it was completely dry, jettisoned it. Freed of the weight and drag of the extra tank, Butterfly jumped upward.
Two tanks left.
Farther north he started to see white, at first just a narrow rim of shiny frost on the north-facing side of the crater rings, and then more and more frost, patterns of white in spiderweb traceries across the hills, limning the slightest changes in topography.
He was approaching the polar circle.
Ryan looked up. Ahead of him, the sky had lost its pale ochre color. It was an ominous deep brick red, with knots and swirls of darker color. He cursed under his breath and checked the altimeter. Eleven hundred meters above ground level. He pulled back slightly, trading speed for rate of climb, but it looked like there was no way he could gain enough altitude to climb over the storm.
He could see something moving below. Snakes.
He looked again. Under him, ribbons of white slithered snakelike across the landscape. It was rivers of blowing snow, he realized, following the sinuous path of least resistance across the lowest passes between the hills. The wind velocity at the surface must be horrendous, he thought; it would take fifty meters per second, or even more, for air as thin as the Martian atmosphere to pick up and carry snow.
Spring was coming to the Martian pole. The winter snows, a mixture of carbon dioxide and water ice, were evaporating away with the return of the sun. The sheer mass of vaporizing atmosphere was blasting off the part of the snow that was made from water ice and blowing it south, creating little storms at the edge of the polar cap.
He wouldn't be able to fight those storms, not directly, but they would be local, not global. He banked to the west, turning parallel to the looming banks of cloud, hoping to circle the storm, looking for a gap between the storm cells.
The land below was tundra now. He was at the arctic circle, and below the fluid rivers of airborne snow, the ground was patchy with ice. The ground was ridged in a network of enormous hexagons and triangles and squares all jumbled and fit together like a crazy jigsaw puzzle, the lunatic work of some mad geometer.
He checked the level of liquid oxygen in the fuel tanks. The second tank was almost dry. There was no reserve set aside for detours; if he didn't head back north quickly, they would not have enough range to make the pole.
He switched the fuel feed to the third and final tank, purged out the last little bit of fluid from the second tank, and jettisoned it. At least the Butterfly would be more responsive.
There. A pale color of sky, a wide canyon of clear air between the polar storms.
"Hold on," he said. "The ride is going to get humpy." He banked to the right, following the edge of the storm north.
The polar cap revealed itself as a series of ice cliffs, each one rising above the last, the ice glistening bl
ue. Fast the ice cliffs, the polar cap itself was smoking, the ice boiling away in the summer sun.
And then, suddenly, the ice below him dropped away. He was above an immense ice canyon. A hurricane wind drove down the canyon, a torrent of wind sweeping the airplane helplessly to the west. The wind from the entire evaporating polar cap was funneled into this channel, etching away the ice.
This was the immense Chasma Borealis. Over the eons, the swirling wind had carved away a kilometer's thickness of ice, making a channel for the outflow of the evaporating atmosphere. The bottom of the chasm below him was jumble of dark rock, glacial moraine. He crabbed crosswind across the canyon, onward. To the left, an immense wall of blue ice rose a kilometer up from the jumbled rock of the base to the top.
He barely cleared the top, and abruptly it was calm.
At the top of the cliff was a rippled plain of snow-covered ice, stretching to the horizon. The pole, according to the inertial navigation system, was three hundred kilometers away.
It might have been a thousand.
Butterfly was out of fuel.
Ryan made another fifty kilometers before the rocket died completely. Engine out, in the thin atmosphere Butterfly could glide about as well as a brick. He stretched the glide as far as he could, eking out a few precious kilometers, and then flared it in to the lightest touchdown he could. It skidded across the snow like a sled, and Ryan struggled to hold the wings level as it fishtailed down the snow. It sledded, bumping against the irregular ice, and sledded—Ryan was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to stop. Until suddenly there was a boulder in the middle of the ice field.
There was no way to steer the aircraft. Ryan pulled back hard, but the airspeed was too low to hop the boulder. The rock ripped across the bottom of the fuselage. He did his best to keep the wings level, but the airplane slewed around and the right wing scraped on the ground. With a spray of snow, the wing buckled, and the ripped wing spar suddenly lost pressure. The wing bent back and tore off. The airplane rolled up, cartwheeled, and came apart.
Mars Crossing Page 28
