A Routine Departure, Terry Wilson [reading strategies book txt] 📗

surface where the plume was. Still no sign of the parachute, the only part of the lander big enough for the camera to have any hope of making out.

Ronny rushes to her side, "Do you see anything?"

"I'd say about a forty metre splat mark. I hope you're about to tell me that's the dust kicked up by the descent rockets," the twenty-seven year old biologist says, handing him the camera.

The boyish twenty-nine year old huffs, "She's a goner, I'd say. Thomas lost the signal a few seconds after the parachute deployed early. The last ground speed sample we got was eighteen seconds after the chute deployed."

The black lady takes the laptop computer and looks at the lander's telemetry display, finding the value with her finger, "Two hundred eighty nine metres per second." Handing it back she says, "No wonder I couldn't see the chute." Apparently, the lander and its six tonne payload were still supersonic when they encountered the surface of the planet.

Beatrice takes her camera back and floats towards the rover. Thomas, forty-seven with his grey fringed black hair and fickle peppered mustache. His eyes wide and attentive, he asks, "Please tell me you saw the chute."

She hands him the camera. The darkened pixel that could be the Destiny booster sits at the edge of the frame. In the middle is a patch of dark, speckled grey. Thomas realizes he's probably looking at a debris field.

Lucy Graheme, her long blonde hair imprisoned in a bun at the back of her head, the small sticks protruding from it look almost like TV antennae, floats into the hab. She looks older than thirty-one; please don't tell her that. "We'll be hearing from Malton in about fifteen minutes. DSN will have the Dopplers for us." With a small smile, she adds, "I needed to go on a diet, anyway."

Ronny already has the trailer's manifest called up on the laptop, "I'll let the calorie-budgeteers do the gruntwork, but it looks like our major discomfort is going to be the loss of the second quad. How are we going to check out Greenhorn Plateau without it?"

"Put a few more miles on Lowell, I guess," Lucy suggests, referring to the big pressurized rover they plan to land in tomorrow.

Thomas smiles, "From a scientific perspective, how important is Greenhorn Plateau."

Ronny runs his hand over his short blonde hair, looking like his world is crashing down around him. "I ... I don't know. What we do know is that it's the floor of a crater the wind has blown away the sides of. Underneath it, the strata we could find might be boring, or-" he pauses, looking over to the picture of it taped to the taut wall of the inflatable habitat.

"There could be dinosaur bones for all we know," Beatrice whispers, preparing her soul for the inevitable announcement from Thomas that they won't be able to visit the site.

"Could it be worth retargeting our landing over?" Thomas asks quietly.

Lucy's head spins at him.

"We could bring Lowell down between Greenhorn and Destiny tomorrow, within walkback distance. Remote drive the quad from Trailer One. That would take about a day and a half. We got thirty-six on board," Thomas' eyes roll up at the ceiling as he does the math in his head. "Six for deploy, four for wrapping up, four for driving back gives us the site for nineteen, maybe twenty days?"

Ronny's eyes light up, "You wanna do that?"

Lucy's got a trajectory up on her laptop.

"We can't do it, can we?" Beatrice groans, "Some maneuver thing."

Lucy says, "We'd need to do a plane change, maneuver point's in three hours."

"We could put off our landing for a day and still have the site for eighteen," Thomas says hopefully.

"Deorbit's in four hours, and deorbit prep takes one," Lucy says, looking up from her laptop.

"So either way, we have just two and a half hours to convince Malton to change a landing site we've been planning to go to for two and a half years," Thomas explains.

Lucy nods and hums.

Mission commander Thomas "Major Tom" Shinra, survivor of the Sprint crew ferry's maiden voyage that could have been written for the 1983 Peter Schilling song Coming Home, seditiously curls up the left corner of his lip as his eyes return to the geologist, "You wanna do this?"

Ronny smiles. He officially takes charge seven days after they land, being the chief geologist and outdoorsman. Did he just make a rocket science decision deferred to him by the mission's chief rocket scientist?

"Tom, the site could be just plain enormous," Beatrice emphasizes, "We have to-" Beatrice stops, now that Thomas has his eyes on her.

"Don't convince me, Convince Malton," Thomas says. Malton, Ontario is the home of the mission's control centre. "Type fast," he says as he stretches his fingers, "These things take eight chapter proposals."

Lucy races to her favorite spot in the rover to draw up her trajectory chapter. Thomas is beside her, budgeting the propellants in their almost empty maneuver stage, "We can combine the maneuver," he says, "get us our day back."

Lucy pauses, refining the combined deorbit-plane change solution on her computer, then says, "An hour for deorbit prep. The only way we can make that is if Malton makes the decision in like, an hour."

"Well, then," he opens a new window, "I'll see if I can get Graham and Battler to start up the landing site revolution back home."

Lucy ignores the message alarm, <Sorry about Trailer Two.> But the second alarm stops her cold, <URGENT: Greenhorn Indispensable; Deorbit Maneuver Altered>

"Holy crap!" she barks, "You're not gonna believe this, Tom."

"What?" he turns, "Trailer Two survived?"

"Guys! Turn on your tee-vees!!" Ronny hollers from the habitat above.

Thomas gasps as he notices the message, calls it up on his own computer.

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URGENT: Greenhorn Indispensable; Deorbit Maneuver Altered

Equinox,

The trajectory guys told us this morning that Trailer Two was coming in just a tad under the corridor. They didn't think we were going to actually lose it, but one of them did a couple fast runs and figured there was a small, but significant chance that the guidance system would overcorrect, overshoot, pop the chute early and crash and we just _knew_ the FSL bastards would do exactly that to us if this were a sim. So we started working what the loss of the trailer was going to do to us, and the worst effect is the loss of the second ATV restricting us to Lowell and walkback range, making a visit to Greenhorn at best, a major inconvenience. From the normal plan, we figured a trek to the site to give us thirty days on an excursion time of ninety days, something we might not be able to do if the CELSS gives us trouble (Outbound already has 12 days of work for you guys on that.) Then Billy in the trench said, "I'll try a retarget," came back half an hour later with the attached maneuver plan for the brand new "Site 347" just in time for us to watch Trailer Two go splat.

Now, we won't _make_ you guys do it if you're uncomfortable changing the landing site you've trained for all this time, but we do think you should _really_ consider putting Lowell down between Greenhorn and Destiny. (Personal from Bill: Battler is _still_ on my case!!) Depending on how much charcoal you can save from the hab, We'd say you got 15, 20 days tops to actually work the site (counting the wraps, driveback, fetching the ATV from Trailer One, which will take you probably 12-14 days.) Please get back to us right away.

Your friends in Malton
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Three hours later, the maneuver stage fires for the last time. The Hab floats away, and the maneuver stage, along with its "stovetop" service module and "wok" sunshields. Thomas, the greatest docking pilot within a hundred million kilometres, carefully backs Lowell's Stampede Lander out of the "birdcage".

"Get some sleep, fellas," Thomas orders, "Tomorrow's a busy day. In twelve hours, we're going to be on the surface of Mars."

As if.

Lucy gets the most sleep at about three hours.

Thomas realized that between the comic about Trailer Two drawn up by the New York Times and the comic about Trailer Two drawn up by the Toronto Star, he actually managed to fall asleep.

Ronny and Beats? They ganged up on the demons of Doom 6 and wasted a whole bunch of digital shotgun ammo and are still the most energized of the four.

Strapped into their seats, the four wait for entry interface, having done all their checklists, memorized every known glitch. They all know that in twelve minutes, there's a twelve percent chance they'll all be dead. When it comes to Mars, "hell" is spelled with three letters:

EDL.

Entry lasts about eight minutes and they will experience about four or five times the force of Earth's gravity as they skim through the outer edge of Mars' atmosphere. Lucy will watch the guidance system, taking the controls if need be. Descent lasts about two minutes starting with the deployment of the parachute. At this point, Thomas takes over. Landing starts with the ignition of the rockets and will take no longer than fifty-two seconds. Fifty-two seconds? That's when Stampede runs out of fuel and dies. Thomas hopes to have it over in thirty.

Fire surrounds the lander and starts to thin away. The force on the astronauts tapers off from its maximum of 4.6g. This doesn't stop the illusion that each second that ticks by gets longer and longer. To Lucy, the surface of Mars is starting to feel like the event horizon of a black hole, and that for her, time will come to a perfect standstill before she can open the parachutes.

The guidance system wants to level off the ship's roll early, exactly the same thing that killed Trailer Two. It fires the thrusters to roll left. Lucy lifts her heavy, suited arm and sets her gloved hand on the stick, tilting it right. The thrusters fire to stop the roll. There was supposed to be an alarm, but the only thing Lucy can hear is the pounding of her heart every few seconds. She can feel the breath flow past her lips, but she can't hear her own voice as she bellows, "I have control." Her blue eyes scan the screen showing the craft's speed and altitude. She glances left to see Thomas switch his screen to view the speed and altitude each of the three guidance computers thinks the craft is going. She doesn't need to worry about that. Just concentrate on flying the ship.

The Stampede Lander weighs only twelve tonnes, a heck of a lot less then the eighty tonnes experts thought would bring mankind to Mars only ten years ago. Twelve tonnes is a special number. Every lander that has ever successfully landed on Mars (and two that haven't: 1999's Mars Polar Lander and yesterday's Trailer Two) used parachutes and aeroshells based on the four billion today dollar legacy of the Viking landers of 1975.