The directional thrusters on the module were now working. Ewa could feel their effect as a slight pressure toward the left. They were pulling to the left of the ship.
“Can you wait to slow us down to enter orbit until we’ve heard from Theo?” Ewa asked.
“Negative,” Andy replied. “Every second is costing us more fuel.”
The counterthrust started, and the engine built up so much force that Ewa was suddenly one and half times as massive as she was on Earth. Someone in the corner yelped. Somebody had probably gotten jammed up against a crate. Ewa watched the module slowly separate itself from the ship on her helmet screen. The Santa Maria’s giant belly was gradually catching up to them.
“Crap, the directional thrusters are too weak,” Andy said. “Prepare for impact.”
The module took a hard blow to the side. Ewa saw how the ship’s fuselage collided with the hull of the module. If Theo had happened to be standing there, he would have been squashed. She then felt the module start to spin. The collision with the passing fuselage had set the module in rotation. They couldn’t slow down like this! The engine’s thrusters stopped working and would stay offline as long as the module spun.
“Andy, can you stabilize us?”
“Already trying.”
Ewa could feel his efforts. The engine seemed to stutter, but that was Andy’s doing. He had activated it as a means of counteracting the rotation. He was really good at this.
“Theo?”
She once again heard groaning and heavy breathing. But he was still outside!
“Can we do anything?” she asked.
“Ooof.”
He was back!
“That was a... wild ride... not making... progress.”
The module slowly stopped turning. They were now about the weight they were on Earth.
“I’m heading to the airlock,” Theo said.
Ewa imagined him crawling along the surface of the module. He wasn’t weightless anymore. Along with his suit and backpack, he had to now weigh 150 kilograms. Could his safety line handle that?
“One... more... meter...,” he murmured. “Man, this is hard.”
“Theo, we need you in here,” Ewa replied.
“Yeah, I’m coming already...,” The transmission broke off. No signal flashed up on Ewa’s screen. Theo’s camera went dead.
“Andy, can you see anything?”
“Shit, no. Nothing!”
Ewa held her hand up in front of her view hole. This couldn’t be true! In the last second!
“You shouldn’t curse so much.” That was Theo’s voice. It was coming from the internal microphone in the airlock.
“What did you... You scared the hell out of us!” Ewa shouted.
“Something scraped past my helmet and took out my camera and antenna,” Theo responded.
“Come in here now. I’m waiting with the whip,” Ewa said.
“I’d rather wait here in the airlock until we’re in orbit. There’s more room in here than where you are.”
“You’re just worried about what’s coming, you old scaredy-cat.”
Sol 6, Endeavour
“You’re lucky not to be in the base right now,” Mike said. He looked really miserable on the monitor.
“Earth?”
“Lance, it honestly feels like the entire planet wants to make accusations against us. At least everyone who can contact us. We overstepped our authority, jeopardized our mission. The only thing they haven’t tried to saddle us with is the civil war in South Africa.”
“So, we were supposed to let the people in the Santa Maria just die?”
“Of course, nobody puts it in so many words, but I have the feeling we were supposed to just let them spend another year orbiting the sun. They probably hoped that this little problem would take care of itself. The official statement is that we should have asked for authorization for every step we took, and the experts might have been able to come up with better solutions.”
“Do they really not get it that everything had to happen fast?”
“They would’ve likely preferred for everything to go at a bureaucratic pace. Then nobody would’ve been at fault when the Santa Maria failed to decelerate enough to enter Mars orbit. Didn’t the experts always say that an expedition like that was insane and didn’t stand a chance? In a way, that makes sense. Otherwise, a volunteer organization is going to show the nations of the world that someone can actually make it to Mars on a tenth of our budget.”
“Well, they can be happy then. It’s now proven that only the more expensive kind of expedition works.”
“They’re afraid, Lance, that these amateurs are going to ruin the professional show. When you get back down here, the base is going to look like some refugee detention camp in Jordan. The surroundings look the part already. No one will want to see pictures like this on TV.”
“Does this mean we won’t have to do the TV shoot? That would be great news!”
“Not exactly. I’ve managed to sell them the new situation as a hero story. Professionally trained NASA astronauts rescue amateur team from Europe. The TV freaks will be all over this one.”
“But the MfE folks are from all over the world, not just Europe.”
“Doesn’t matter. It was a Dutchman’s idea, so that project is European in concept. Everyone will enjoy a little Europe bashing.”
“So we need to be prepared for some reporter to show up at the airlock?”
“Haha, Lance, maybe in a hundred years. No, I’ll keep the two of you out of it, I promise. But when you get back down here, I don’t think you’ll be able to avoid one or two interviews.”
“Thanks. If I had to give interviews from up here, I’d lose my mind.” Lance turned the camera so that Mike could get a better view of the command module. “Look.”
“That’s about how I imagined it,” Mike said.
“We were lucky they didn’t have spacesuits for their sheep and goats, or they would be floating around here, too.”
“I would rather not think about how it must smell because of them.”
“Good point. The first thing I did was send our passengers to the showers. Seriously though, they make a very reasonable impression.”
“And their leader, Ewa?”
“I would have liked to meet her, but she stayed on board their Dragon module. I’d like to know how she managed everything, despite all their problems. That woman has her head screwed on right.”
“Careful, Lance. You’ve got a girlfriend.”
“Come on, that’s not what I meant.”
“Well, in that case, have a good time with our guests. I’ll see you soon. Mars out.”
His stomach growled. The sound reminded Lance that he had wanted to eat something before his chat with Mike. He stood up from his seat. Sharon seemed to be asleep. At least her eyes were closed, and her breathing was deep and slow. How could she do that in the middle of this chaos? As Lance turned around, he slammed his knee against the hard edge of a box. “Ouch!” slipped out. That hadn’t been there before. They really had to secure everything that the newcomers had brought along before they landed.
Greeting the guests at the airlock after they had refueled the module had been fun. Lance didn’t really see himself as a social creature. He had never volunteered with a charity, and he only made donations because it was important to his girlfriend. Maybe the pleasure had been based on the fact that for the past months he had only been around the same three faces. Shaking hands with eight newcomers all at once had reminded him that he was part of a larger entity after all. However, unlike him, these people intended to remain forever in this desert wasteland. He had to respect that. For the rest of their lives they wouldn’t see any other faces—unless they decided to produce new additions themselves.
But the coming weeks would be stressful. Ewa, the commander, had insisted that they would move as quickly as possible to their own MfE bases, but how would that function? They would have to put up with each other for a whi
le. Mission Control wouldn’t be happy about this, as they wouldn’t be able to work on expanding the base as planned. They would need to loan their machines to the settlers. This wasn’t a problem for Lance, since the base offered enough room for four scientists. The NASA crew that would be replacing them in twelve months would have to hurry the expansion along.
Lance floated a level down to where their guests were staying. He greeted them briefly and moved purposefully toward the supplies closet. He already knew what he was hungry for. He pulled out the drawer, and his mouth turned downward. Someone had emptied the tube of nougat cream. Every last gram had been quite artistically squeezed out. Lance knew what an empty tube looked like. He didn’t even need to check. And the culprit dared to leave the container in the drawer to rub his nose in it. You got here too late, Lance.
He turned around, trying everything he could to keep his composure. It was just a sugar-fat confection with chocolate flavoring! “May I have your attention, please?” He still couldn’t keep his voice from trembling. He held the empty tube up high.
“Oh, I’m sorry about that, Lance.”
A young woman in a bra and underwear floated toward him. Lance turned red. Nothing like this had ever happened to him! He cleared his throat.
“I should have disposed of the tube. So sorry,” the woman said.
Marilou. Now he recalled her name. She was clearly of Asian descent. He could tell that from her face, which was his current focus. “Uh, yes, that’s what I was going to ask.” He tried to keep his eyes locked on hers, but he couldn’t manage to.
He wanted to give himself a slap. How would he seem to all of them? A lecherous guy who stared at a woman without saying a word. He had to end this. “Yes,” he said. “This goes for all of you. The recycling area is located in the lower drawer.”
He pointed at the corner of the room. The main thing was that this wasn’t in Marilou’s direction. He needed to take something out of the drawer, but all he found there were various varieties of cough drops. Cough drops? Who had packed those? It had to be someone from the Santa Maria. The stockpile was impressive, but where would they catch a respiratory virus around here?
Lance cleared his throat again. His throat actually did feel a little scratchy. He pulled out a package of lozenges and floated back upstairs with as much dignity as possible. As he did that, he passed by a mirror that hadn’t hung there before and was shocked. It was apparently impossible in a weightless environment to move with dignity. He looked like a gigantic, fat fish flailing around on dry land.
“Glad you’re back!” Sharon rescued him from his embarrassment.
“What’s going on?” Lance asked.
“The Santa Maria module is about to start its descent to the surface.”
“Good for us. We’ll have a box seat view for at least thirty minutes.”
“That was the idea.”
“What is their rationale for doing it now?”
“I think they hope that we can help them if there’s an emergency,” Sharon said.
“How do they imagine that? We can’t just fly back and forth across the area. Changing our orbit would cost us at least one Mars circuit.”
“I believe they know that, Lance. It’s more about feeling like they aren’t alone if we’re in a good spot to watch everything.”
A feeling? Lance couldn’t imagine that this would really do much to help the seven remaining MfE members in the module. But he didn’t want to argue with Sharon.
“Endeavour, please respond.”
Sharon answered the call. The face of the blonde appeared on the screen. She was wearing her spacesuit, but her helmet was off. Her face was very flushed.
“Sharon here. Do you have everything ready?”
“We just initiated the deceleration process.”
Sharon started laughing because a goat suddenly popped its head into view.
“This is Petey,” Ewa said, chuckling in response to Sharon’s mirth.
“Pleased to meet you, Petey,” Sharon joked.
“I would like to send you our telemetry data. You might be able to catch irregularities before we’re in a position to. After six months of weightlessness, the g-forces won’t be a walk in the park.”
“Of course, that’s a good idea. We’ll watch out for you.”
“I know you can’t really help us if something goes wrong, but an early error report might save us.”
So much for feelings, Lance thought. Ewa had a very realistic understanding of her options. He liked her already, although he had yet to meet her in person.
The picture on his screen flickered. Lance thumped it a couple of times from the back. This had helped him in the past, and he wasn’t disappointed today, either. He was watching the module’s landing. He had strapped himself to his seat for this. Until just a moment ago, it had been noisy on the lower level where the MfE astronauts were staying, but now a ghostly silence reigned. The newcomers were also following their friends’ maneuvers on a monitor.
The data looked great. The module was moving right along its intended course. If this continued, they would make a model landing. At the moment, their engine was busy reducing the speed of the module by combusting hydrogen with oxygen and creating steam. Lance checked the temperatures in the combustion chamber, which at 3,200 degrees Celsius was within the normal range.
Presently the module’s engine shut down. Its tanks weren’t completely empty, but it would need the remainder of the fuel for the final meters. The Mars atmosphere now took over the braking process. Despite being so thin, the module was moving so quickly that each molecule it encountered acted as a negative velocity influence on it.
Lance switched to the module’s internal camera. The seven individuals were lying in a colorful scattering across the floor. They seemed to be quite calm, although they were now technically at the mercy of their recycled, bargain-basement module.
The lower side of the landing module was heating up. That wasn’t a surprise. A heat shield provided protection against this, but it wouldn’t last indefinitely. Besides that, the Mars atmosphere wasn’t thick enough to bring the module to a complete stop. There was nothing he could do. Everything had been programmed beforehand, but something made him feel anxious. Shouldn’t the parachute be out by now?
And, there it was! It initially unfurled as a ring that resembled an unused condom. Even at this stage, it was a very efficient braking mechanism. And then the automated system blew air into it, and the condom expanded into a giant parachute. Lance focused the radar on it. The chute was over thirty meters in diameter.
“Looking good,” he said to Sharon.
“Yeah.”
On Lance’s screen, the elevation profile of the landing sequence had a fairly sharp kink in its line about thirty kilometers from the base. This was where the module would have to release its parachute, since it would impede the journey over the last meters and would prevent the module from hitting its target. The screen showed the module as a blinking dot that was moving along its plotted trajectory. The point had just reached the kink—and overshot it.
“Did you—” he started.
Sharon had already opened the radio channel. “Your parachute hasn’t released,” she said.
“Yes, the mechanism has jammed. Damn it,” Ewa replied.
“If you can’t make it work, you’re going to fly way past the base.”
“I know. We’re on it. Just a sec.”
A camera image appeared on the Endeavour’s screens. The only sound that was being picked up was a loud whooshing. Lance switched over to Ewa.
“What is that?”
“Theo. He’s climbing out.”
Lance pulled the camera image back up. She was right. He had seen this once in an old James Bond film, where the hero climbed across the surface of an airplane in mid-flight. It was quite clear. He recognized the Mars surface, as the wearer of the camera crawled across a landing module that was dangling at the end of a parachute 1,000 meters above the
ground. Nobody would believe him when he told them about this. The whooshing sound was the wind.
“Fifty-kilometer deviation,” Sharon said.
The camera briefly swung toward the underside of the parachute. It was astonishingly far away. Had he just heard wheezing? It was impossible to guess what the man was trying to do. “Does he have a knife?” Lance asked quietly.
“A wire cutter,” Ewa answered. “That isn’t a normal parachute rope.”
“How did he know that?”
“No clue. He had insisted on spending the landing in the airlock.”
“But the wire cutter?”
“He had hauled a toolbox into the airlock with him. Wanted to be prepared for anything.”
“That’s insane,” Lance said.
He really hoped that Theo survived. It was evident that the people from the Santa Maria were crazy, but there was a method to this guy’s kind of lunacy. Theo would be an asset to the NASA base. Ewa would be, too, he thought.
The image suddenly tilted. Lance’s hands tightened around his armrests. But he wasn’t following an endless fall. Theo had probably just managed to clip the first cable, which had caused the module’s altitude to abruptly change. The man must be securely attached to a safety line. Theo seemed to give ample consideration to his crazy missions.
Another wobbling. That was probably the next cable.
“How many cables are attached to your parachute?” Lance asked.
“I don’t know,” Ewa replied. “I wasn’t trained as a commander, so I hardly know the ship.”
The camera tilted forward, momentarily transmitting a view of the abyss. They only have five hundred meters to go, Lance guessed.
“One hundred-kilometer deviation,” Sharon noted.
It hadn’t taken long for the module to cover a significant distance. How would the seven astronauts return to the base? But one problem at a time.
The fourth shaking. Four cables. Lance hoped that was all of them, but the module was still attached to the parachute. Lance took a deep breath and felt himself start to sweat.
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