Analog SFF, June 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  They all crowded into the tiny galley, where Ellen announced the happy event. She passed out bulbs of juice, and proposed a toast.

  “To Jodie on her birthday. May she have a long and happy life, and follow in her grandfather's footsteps.” Grinning, she rapped her bulb against David's and the others followed suit. Even Beaume managed to raise him a convincing smile. After taking a sip, Ellen unwrapped the chocolate and distributed halves around the group.

  “Chocolate,” breathed Porter, popping a piece in her mouth. She closed her eyes and a moan issued from her lips. David tucked his own morsel of chocolate into his pocket and watched in amusement while Porter savored the treat. Finally swallowing, she opened her eyes to see them all gaping at her. Flame red shot up her face.

  Ellen coughed. “Well, I'd better get back to the cockpit. Still my watch."

  “Don't forget the battery level check's due this shift,” David said. “Earth'll want to know how much we've got in the tank."

  Ellen nodded and drifted out of the galley.

  Beaume followed hot on her heels. “Hey, I'm claiming the reader."

  Their voices faded as they bickered their way through the length of the ship. David shook his head. Good thing they were only twenty-four hours from the Mars platform, or they might have their space murder yet.

  Porter cleared her throat. “If they're any indication, we won't arrive a moment too soon. Now that I've made this trip, I can't understand why anyone would put up with it."

  David finished his juice. “It isn't all like this. Sure, the travel can be a bit uncomfortable, but I warned you the McAuliffe's not a pleasure barge. The vista on Mars will be worth it, though. It's like nothing you've ever seen before."

  “The cost for us to admire that vista is astronomical. How can you defend that when so much remains to be done on Earth?"

  David sighed. “It's not just about admiring the vista on an alien world. Earth's a dangerous place: war, famine, disease, global warming, asteroid strike, supervolcanoes like Yellowstone. We're just tenants on planet Earth, and the landlord could evict us any time he likes. The rent's been rising for decades, and it's time we took the hint."

  Porter raised an eyebrow. “Is there a point to this poetic aside?"

  David tossed his juice bulb into the disposal. “Like you said, the ‘21 eruption was a wake-up call. Self-sustaining colonies would ensure the human race could survive another plague like AIDS or the ‘09 flu pandemic, or the second coming of the Yellowstone supervolcano when it happens."

  “And how many lives will be saved in your colonies? A few hundred? What about the billions on Earth who'd be better prepared for a disaster if we spent the resources there?"

  “I don't buy that. Our budget wouldn't save billions of people on Earth. Magbeam's cut costs enormously. Sure, the colonies aren't ready yet, but if we put the effort in, we avoid having all our eggs in one basket if the worst happens. That's worth a little risk and discomfort."

  Porter laughed. “Maybe you space cowboys want to risk your necks out here, but ordinary people don't give a damn whether we have colonies on Mars."

  David waved his hand at the walls around them. “This ship's official name is just some six-figure project code, but years ago I rechristened her with a tiny red ribbon and a champagne miniature. She's named for a school teacher of mine, Christa McAuliffe. She wasn't an astronaut or an adventurer, just an ordinary teacher with a husband and two children, and an understanding of how space could open doors for a kid like me. She inspired me to quit my dad's wrecking yard and go to college, and later to leave a dead-end career in the Air Force and go into space. She was one of the seven people who died when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. She never saw space, so I brought her name with me. Ordinary people do care."

  Porter opened her mouth and closed it again. For the first time, David saw her hostility melt, saw a soft, vulnerable woman emerge, felt his own pulse quicken.

  Ellen's leaden voice spoke over the intercom. “David, we have another transmission from Earth. One of the Martian colonists has died."

  David's heart sank, and Porter turned sharply away.

  “We don't belong out here."

  * * * *

  David came convulsively awake, adrenaline bursting through him as the raucous blaring of the Master Alarm shattered the silence. The lights flickered, and the rotating amber of the alarm indicators turned the cabin into a chaos of shadow and light. David wrenched at his sleeping belt and lunged for the door. The ship lurched, and his head hammered into the bulkhead. Ears ringing, he hauled himself into the corridor. The ship stopped shaking, but the lights continued to wax and wane at half their usual intensity. As he dragged himself toward the cockpit, the other cabin burst open to reveal a half-dressed and disheveled Dr. Porter, naked terror in her eyes. David ignored her, pulling himself forward hand over hand. He wrenched the door open to find the cockpit empty, its darkness punctuated by a flickering aurora of emergency warning lights, flashing urgently in myriad colors.

  “What's happening?” Porter screamed. Her eyes were wide and white, and her hands shook.

  “Christ knows!” David yelled back. “Some kind of power failure. Any sign of Ellen or Beaume?"

  She displayed enough self-control to shake her head, at least.

  David wormed his way into the cockpit and plucked up an emergency headset. Its power lights remained dark. “Damn it! Communications are down. Follow me!” He shouldered Porter aside and thrust himself along the main companionway toward the engineering spaces. At the first connecting hatch, he looked back. Porter clung to the cockpit door, transfixed by the play of warning lights across the control panels.

  “Porter! Move your ass, damn it!” he shouted.

  Shocked out of her inaction, she followed, fumbling clumsily along in his wake.

  As David thumped to a halt against the engineering hatch, a fire claxon burst out, fast and insistent, louder even than the Master Alarm. He seized a fire mask from the wall and pulled it over his head, then grabbed an extinguisher and opened the hatch.

  Banks of hulking battery cells stood in rows, electrical relays and monitoring equipment sandwiched alongside. At the far end of the compartment, from between two batteries, fire poured out into the central walkway. Unconstrained by gravity, it dipped and whirled, spreading and splashing outward like a liquid, bright oranges fading to blue. And over the banshee screeching of the alarms a more primal sound issued: the scream of a human being in agony and terror.

  David thrust himself forward, arrowing along the central walkway with the extinguisher held out. A quick burst of carbon dioxide dashed away the drifting droplets of flame, and he thudded home against the side of one of the batteries. He sucked in a deep breath and pushed off for the center of the fire, spraying the extinguisher indiscriminately before him. He hammered into something solid, and felt choking heat below him. A globule of liquid fire splashed onto his hand, and he roared in pain.

  Another extinguisher opened up, bathing him in white clouds of CO2, and the heat subsided. David spotted Porter anchored a few yards from him, extinguisher in hand and a mask over her face.

  Over the blaring of the alarms, he shouted to be heard. “Porter! The fire's out! Just inside the hatch there's an emergency venting control—a red handle. I can't see a damn thing in here."

  She nodded and dragged herself away. David pulled himself down to the deck. Billowing clouds of gas masked everything, forcing him to search by touch, not knowing what he might find. The screaming had stopped. A sudden howl announced the activation of the emergency venting fans—thank God they've got a stand-alone power supply—and the clouds whirled away up to the extraction port in the ceiling. After a few moments, the room cleared enough for him to see again.

  “Porter! Get over here! We've got people down!"

  * * * *

  David stared down at the bundle of sheeting held fast in a cargo net. Through the plastic, he could no longer see the charred flesh that used to b
e her rosy cheeks, the scorched and blackened teeth that had once been her vivacious smile, but they were in his mind nonetheless. He'd suffered ten minutes of dry retching before he'd been able to bag her up, telling himself the tears were caused by pain from the convulsions in his empty stomach. Ellen Francis had died on his watch—his watch. As the commander of the vessel and leader of the crew, the responsibility was inescapably his.

  But Ellen had been more than just a colleague. She'd been friend, comrade, and confidant. She'd been the woman he wished his daughter could become, from whom she could hardly have been more different. Anna shunned him, blaming him for the divorce; Ellen always wrapped him in warmth. Bold, courageous, always smiling, she'd thrived in space. When the panel turned down her application to join the Martian colony permanently, she'd just lifted her chin and soldiered on, taking the rejection a thousand times better than he did.

  David secured the cargo net and wiped his eyes. There was work to be done. He floated into the engineering space where Ellen had died, levered away an electrical panel, and lost himself in a labyrinth of burnt wires and molten fuses.

  Porter touched him on the shoulder, and he turned to face her. “How's Beaume?"

  She shook her head. “Not good. He's alive, but barely. He has a burn on his right hand where the electricity entered, and another on his right instep where it went to ground. If the current had crossed his heart, he'd have died immediately. I administered drugs for shock and started IV fluids. What happened?"

  David gestured to the monitoring panel in front of him, illuminated by a spacesuit's spotlight. Rows of charge gauges registered zero. Even the warning lights below them were dark. “The ship's entire electrical reserve shorted through them. Shouldn't have been possible, but the safety interlocks isolating the batteries from one another weren't activated. I guess it was Beaume who forgot; the interlocks are automated on the modern shuttles he's used to."

  “The charge must have gone through both of them,” Porter said. “Beaume was lucky and Ellen wasn't. I hope she died before the fire reached her."

  David's jaw tightened. She didn't. I heard her screaming. “These gauges are shot: I don't even know how much power's left in the system. There's been charge backstreaming throughout the ship: systems are shorted or fused everywhere I look. I've cut us down to minimum life support to conserve what we have."

  “We can recharge the batteries from the solar panels, can't we?"

  David squeezed his eyes shut. “There's a nominal seventy-two hour recharge time. I've already started the process, but we're not getting much power through, and we've only got sixteen hours until beam pickup."

  “What's the bottom line?"

  “It takes about seventy-five percent of the total battery capacity to run the magnets for a full four-hour deceleration. The best I can figure, they're at about five percent capacity. They've been recharging throughout the trip, using the excess energy from the solar panels, but we lost nearly everything in the accident. Even with life support at minimum, the panels are so damaged they're only providing a trickle. Even if we turned life support off and took to suits, the batteries couldn't gather enough power by the time we reached the beam pickup point. There just isn't time."

  Realization dawned. “Oh no—"

  David met her eyes. “We won't have enough power to decelerate. I'm sorry."

  She slumped back, blinking away tears.

  “Porter—Victoria, listen. We're not helpless. We've still got supplies, and the panels are providing enough power to run minimum life support pretty much indefinitely. They'll send someone out after us."

  “A rescue at nearly forty kilometers a second?” A look of hope died, stillborn. “I'm not a complete fool, David. We're not going to make it."

  “Don't think that way. They brought Apollo 13 back safely. We're not—” He stopped.

  Porter blinked at him, then voiced his unspoken thought. “Free return trajectory?"

  David nodded, amazed the thought hadn't occurred to him before. Ellen's dead, damn it. Get your mind back to the problem. “It could work, too. I'd need to know exactly how much we have in the batteries, and somehow get a transmission to the Mars station. But if there's enough juice left, we could run the magnets to slingshot us around Mars and back towards Earth. That's only a short interaction: we've gotta be able to get enough power together for it. By the time we get close to Earth, the batteries should have recharged enough to decelerate at HEO station. If we can get the orbit right.” He snatched up a scratch pad and grease pencil and started jotting figures. “Ever done orbital calculations before?"

  Porter shook her head. “I can do the mental arithmetic if you want, though. I won a state prize for it once."

  David grinned and thrust the pad toward her. “All right, then. Check those numbers. Us engineers can't do big math without taking our boots off first.” He grabbed the access cover for the battery control panel and scrawled on its surface.

  Porter, more animated than he could remember seeing her, jotted rows of tiny figures along the borders of the pad, brushing her hair absently back from her eyes and muttering silently. David looked at her and thought of Gin, whose same intensity had won her the posting to the Mars colony. He slowed his own scribblings, then reached out and touched Porter's shoulder.

  “Porter, stop. It's no good."

  “No, I think it'd work! We'd only need a velocity change of one or two kilometers per second, and the trajectory's—"

  He held up a hand. “I mean, what about the people on Mars? We're supposed to be thinking about them, not us. Without our medical supplies, most of them will die. We're on a rescue mission; we can't just run away."

  Porter stiffened. “Wait a minute, Longrie! You can't just throw away a chance to save us because you think your heroics will somehow resurrect the colonization program. You're beating a dead horse. The president won't back the appropriations bill for colonist transports. In another year, Mars will be abandoned."

  “Maybe. But it's still there now. And nearly a hundred people could die without our help."

  “Well, that's tragic,” Porter said, “but it was their own mistake that put them in danger. We're on a crippled ship with hardly any power. We'll be lucky to save ourselves, let alone a bunch of colonists. It's simple common sense. If the lifeboat springs a leak, you don't send it out in a storm. Let the relief shuttle rescue the colonists."

  “The relief isn't due for two months. Without our supplies, the colonists will die long before it arrives. And what about Beaume? Do you think he'd survive a two-month trip to Earth? Are you ready to watch him die?"

  “What the hell does it matter whether I want to save him? You said it yourself: there's no power to decelerate. What do you want to do—crash into the planet at forty kilometers a second and hope the medical supplies survive?"

  “What if I could think of something—build something—to extract power from the magbeam?” David mused. “It's essentially electricity, after all. After we pick up the beam, we could recharge the batteries before switching the magnets on."

  Porter chewed her lip. “But then you wouldn't have four hours’ deceleration time. We'd overshoot."

  David grabbed his grease pencil and scribbled furiously. “Not if we decelerated harder than normal. The platforms are tested at something like a hundred and twenty percent of normal operating levels."

  “And if it isn't enough?"

  “I didn't say it would be easy. But we won't have to strip off as much velocity as normal. We're not looking to rendezvous with the magbeam platform: without Beaume there's no one qualified to pilot their lander."

  “So how the hell do we get to the surface—sprout wings and fly?"

  “Back in the Stone Age, before magbeam, the McAuliffe was the first ship ever to make a successful landing and relaunch from Mars. The magbeam harness is just strapped on; it's got explosive bolts so it can be jettisoned for maintenance. If we cut it loose after we decelerate, she'll be reentry-capable again. Reentry
orbit is faster than the beam platform's orbital velocity, so the deceleration should be a bit easier—"

  “As easy as free return?"

  “No, but if we can tell the Mars station to switch to a high-power beam after we've recharged our batteries, we can push ourselves into a reentry orbit. Then we use Mars’ atmosphere to aerobrake and glide in."

  “You're insane, Longrie. For God's sake, listen to yourself. You've got a granddaughter now; don't you want to see her? Because if you try this crazy plan, you never will."

  “You'd rather run away?"

  “Are you calling me a coward?"

  “What would your superiors think if you took the safe route and let the colonists die? I'd have no choice but to report you vetoed an alternative."

  Her brows drew down. “So now you're threatening me?"

  “I'm just asking you to think about the effect this could have on your career. Think of all the headlines if we save all those people. Isn't that worth taking a chance for?"

  “In other words, ‘sign onto my lunatic scheme, or I'll ruin your career?’ Nice try, but I think my bosses are a bit more objective than that. Why are you so dead set on trying to be a hero?"

  “Do you know anything about boxing?"

  She shook her head. “What are you getting at?"

  “When a boxer's outclassed, he's got two choices. He can either ride out the punishment, accepting the defeat but not getting hurt, or he can forget about defending, go forward, and try for the knockout, even though he could get badly hurt trying. We call that taking the puncher's chance. When I was twenty-two, I won the Air Force Heavyweight Championship that way, against an opponent ten times as good. Got my nose broken, but I won."

  “So?"

  “This mission is right on the ropes, and way behind on points. We could take the shots on our guard, but however well we duck and weave, we still lose. If we take the puncher's chance, we can win clean: save ourselves, the colonists, everything. But we've got to risk walking into the big punch for it. We can't let those colonists die without taking a few swings for them first. What do you say?"