New Mars

Continuing our serialization of Robert Stockman’s novel, Mars Frontier, New Mars is happy to present the second chapter, Flight.

Flight

Kimball and Cruz did not leave right away; it was midnight before they finally returned to the Artemis and made the short, but slow, ride to Gateway. No one wanted to stop talking; the Columbus 1 crew sensed that this was their last human contact, outside the six of them, in about thirty months; Kimball and Cruz wanted to soak up a bit of the glory.

Consequently it was almost 11 a.m. before they finally got underway. The departure was almost undetectable; the engines of the Olympus were fired at very low power for a few minutes to impart 300 meters per second - about 600 miles per hour - to the vehicles, which remained docked together. That was enough speed to encounter Earth in about eight days, when the main engines would fire. The Artemis fired its engines at about the same time and flew to Earth on the same trajectory, partly to keep company and partly to provide a good camera angle for the media.

They used the eight-day coast toward Earth well, mostly for training sessions with ground-based experts while the transmission delay was a mere second or so. Will and David presented their research on lunar impact craters and the search for lunar mantle fragments ejected by the formation of the Aitken South Polar Basin while Laura and Sergei summarized the trip to Devon Island and the final briefings in Houston. Columbus 1 remained docked together as a single complex, though it was not yet rotated for gravity, so they floated in zero gee.

Twenty-four hours before their close approach to Earth the Cimmerium, Ausonia, and Elysium separated from the Olympus, which retained the docking cube. The Cimmerium docked to the cube again, but on the side opposite the Olympus so that the latter could push it. The Ausonia docked directly to the nose of the Elysium so that it could be pushed to Mars as well. The crew was split into two halves; each group of three sat in acceleration couches in the Mars Shuttle’s crew module, which was located in the cargo bay below the fuel tanks and above the engines. To get there they had to float through a small crew capsule - barely the size of a Gemini capsule - at the top of the Mars Shuttle, then descend a one-meter in diameter access shaft past the fuel tanks to the cargo bay and the crew module filling it.

The two shuttles with their interplanetary habitations fell frighteningly fast toward Earth, briefly skimming a precipitous 300 kilometers above the ground at 40,000 kilometers per hour - very nearly the velocity of escape from the Earth. If the engines didn’t fire, the vehicles would fly some 500,000 kilometers from the Earth before falling back. But just as their approach to the South Atlantic Ocean was the fastest and closest, both Shuttles’ five engines roared alive, pushing the crew into their couches with half a gee of acceleration. After seven months of lunar gravity and eight days of weightlessness, it was a shock to Will and David, who felt like lead. The engines fired a mere four minutes, but it felt like four hours to them. Then the engines fell silent, having added 1.2 kilometers per second to the vehicles’ overall velocity. Because they escaped from the Earth’s gravitational pull much faster, they retained much more velocity; enough to send them to Mars in six months.

The two vehicles were now a mere five kilometers apart, and within a few minutes the pilots determined that they were only five centimeters per second different in their acceleration. The Olympus was moving slightly faster, so it fell to the Elysium to catch up and come in for the docking in the process. For twelve hours the two complexes closed, until they were only one hundred meters apart. At that point Will took command of the Ausonia and Ethel the Cimmerium; both undocked from their respective shuttles. Manuevering the Cimmerium around to a different docking cube was relatively simple and did not take much time; Ethel achieved a hard dock in four hours. Will, meanwhile, started to move in very slowly, and three hours later achieved a hard dock of the Ausonia opposite the Cimmerium. Finally, Sergei Landsburg maneuvered in the Elysium very slowly and carefully, docking to the cube five hours later. Twenty-four hours after the trans-Mars injection burn, Columbus 1 was reassembled.

“Everyone take their seats for the spin-up maneuver,” announced Sergei. The other five were all in the great room of the Cimmerium at the time; they sat in the soft, comfortable seats, which were bolted to the floor, and pulled the safety belts across their waists.

Sergei gave a count down, then fired maneuvering thrusters on the two shuttles. As the four-spoked Columbus Interplanetary Station began to rotate, gravity immediately was present. Will felt relief that he now had weight and the up-down orientation that resulted. But within a few seconds, he was surprised the weight was as much as it was, and it kept increasing. Soon he was alarmed. Laura, watching his reaction, laughed. “It’s not that bad, Will!”

“I know, but after seven months on the moon, it feels like Jupiter’s gravity!”

“Spin-up maneuver complete,” reported Sergei.

They all unbuckled their seat belts and stood. Will and David both swayed in the Martian gravity. Laura laughed; Shinji watched with the eye of a professional physician. “Take your time,” he said. “Well, we should all take our time; artificial gravity produces coriolis force that we’ll have to adjust to.”

“Not that bad,” replied Laura. She looked across the room, then proceeded to walk straight toward the kitchenette. She was surprised when she almost crashed into the side of the ladder shaft. “Damn coriolis,” she replied.

“We’re going round and round at what? Twenty-five kilometers per hour?” asked David.

“Twenty-six, I think,” corrected Shinji. “If you run in the direction of movement, you can easily double your weight; run in the opposite direction and you can cancel it out.”

“Until you hit a wall,” said Will. He walked carefully to the ladder shaft, where he looked up. It was now definitely up; they were on the bottom floor, where the gravity was highest. “And if we go up, we have to climb the side toward the spin; climbing will push us against it.”

“Right. And to go down, you can literally slide down the opposite side of the shaft, because it will keep rotating toward you faster and faster as you descend. The shaft may look straight, but it will function like a spiral because of rotation.”

“That should be cool,” said Will. “But right now I have to get used to any gravity at all!”

“It’ll take a few days,” agreed Shinji. “But artificial gravity will certainly make life easier.”

“I’m going to get a shower right now, in fact,” said Ethel. “Good riddance to wet towelettes!” She turned and began to climb up the ladder shaft to her bedroom on the third floor.

“Well, we’ve got chores and maintenance to do,” said Laura. “Shinji, do you need more help with the plant growing cabinets?”

“No, they’re set up and functioning. Now that the plants have some gee, they’ll grow better.”

“Will, any problems with preparing for our flyby of 2015AS?”

He shook his head. “We just got new radar data with revised mass and diameter estimates; it’s carbonaceous chondrite and forty-six meters in diameter on average. Pretty small, but better than no neighbors at all.”

“Too bad it won’t occur closer to the middle of the trip; it’d break up the monotony,” said Laura. “David, how are all the inventories?”

“Excellent so far. We’ve been accumulating waste water and sewage for ten days because the treatment equipment is designed for gravity. Once we start running everything through the equipment, we’ll see whether we get the conversion efficiencies we expect.”

Sergei arrived just that moment. Laura looked at him. “And the trajectory?”

“Hmm? We may not need a midcourse correction; it’s spot on. The shuttle engines fired with great precision.”

“Good.” Laura smiled and looked at the others. “Well folks, we’re on our way to Mars. Columbus 1 is in great shape.”

The crew members dispersed. Will and Dave both slowly, almost painfully, pulled themselves up the ladder to the docking cube, then slowly slid down the other shaft. Now that there was gravity, Will went to his room to finish unpacking. He lined up his mineral samples by type in rows on the shelves, removed the netting from the bed and the plastic retaining strips from the bookshelf, and finished placing useful items on his desk. Then he sat at his desk and looked out the porthole at the Earth, which was still reasonably large, though shrinking noticeably hour by hour. The rest of the day was fatiguing; he wasn’t used to so much gravity, and adjusting took some time. The shift from lunar to Martian gravity, also, threw off his coordination.

The next morning he felt better. After breakfast and their quick crew meeting, he headed for his work station on the second floor of the Ausonia to review the latest data about 2015AS. It came in almost daily. The L2 Interferometry telescope-five three-meter reflecting telescopes spaced out over a frame one hundred meters in diameter, located at the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point-had pointed its mirrors at the object and had taken pictures almost as good as the ones they would take from a mere 15,000 kilometers. Arecibo had bounced radar off it and determined its rotation rate with great precision. “It’s a fast rotator: once every five minutes,” Will reported to Laura, when she stopped by about 11 a.m.

“Does that mean anything, in terms of origin?”

“It means it’s probably a fragment from a collision. It also means the surface has no regolith; the rotational centrifugal force will exceed the pull of gravity. Our laser will have a clean target to hit. Fast rotation is pretty common among the smaller asteroids.”

“Any further word about observatories able to observe the laser bursts?”

“No. L2 will be watching, and that tends to dampen everyone else’s enthusiasm; their data can’t be as good. Besides, there’s a full moon two nights before.”

“I forgot about that. It’s chondrite, right?”

“No, probably stony. The L2 data corrected earlier information. Albedo’s 0.15; chondrite is usually half that, or even less. The infrared absorption spectrum from L2’s observations detected pyroxene.”

“Oh.” Laura was momentarily surprised. “Pyroxene’s a mineral I have never been able to visualize. It’s pretty rare on Earth.”

“No, it’s common, but the crystals are usually suboptic.” Will smiled. “You want to see an example? Come with me.”

“Really?” Laura was surprised by his offer and did not protest. Will stood and walked to the ladder shaft. She followed him up one flight to his room. There, he reached for his samples.

“Here; this is a stony meteorite. Pretty boring and gray. The mass is about half pyroxene.”

“Not much to see; blah and gray.” Laura took the rock, fingered it, rolled it around in her hand. “Where did you get this?”

Will pointed to his collection. “They’re all from the moon. In fact, they’re all from the last seven months. It’s not hard to pick up the entire range of meteorite classifications on the moon. If you look closely, you could do it in a few days.” He grabbed a sample. “Vesta.”

“Really!”

“Sure. V-type meteorites are reasonably easy to find. We now even know they were blasted from Vesta’s south pole, most of the time.”

“The new Asteroid Explorer will be landing TROVs there as well,” agreed Laura, referring to telerobotically operated vehicles that were now used widely in solar system exploration.

Will picked up another sample and handed it to her. She stared at it. “Limestone?”

He nodded. “From outside Tycho, though.”

“Really? A piece of Earth on the moon.” She held it with a new level of reverence.

“I was excited to find it. Of course, there are a lot of Earth rocks on the moon.”

“Yes. Come to think of it, you were part of the team that found that 4.3 billion year old chunk of Earth in Aitken!”

“I was; that was quite special. It was the oldest known piece of Earth until an older piece was found last year, and confirmed theories that Earth once had a methane-ammonia atmosphere. I was part of the team that found the Venus rock two years ago, too.”

“The alleged Venus rock.”

“Sure; but it is. I’ve also found three chunks of Mars. Here’s one of them.” He handed her a piece.

Laura laughed. “You’ve brought a lithic menagerie, haven’t you?”

“They’re heading to my collection on Earth via Mars, I guess. They only weigh a kilo; they fit inside my mass allocation just fine.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. It’s a shame we haven’t found a piece of Mercury.”

“It’s a matter of time. The Europeans will be bringing back chunks in two years, anyway. We can thank the Moon-Mars transportation system; anything that can throw our cargo to Mars can throw pretty good-sized cargos anywhere in the solar system.”

“That’s true.”

He reached back and grabbed a rock from the back row. “Here; would you like a piece of nickel-iron meteorite?”

Laura took it intrigued. She smiled and rolled it around on her palm. But then something changed in her eyes. She handed it back to him. “No, that’s okay. You keep it.” She turned away and looked at the pictures by his desk. “Are those your parents?”

“Yes.” He looked at her closely; she did indeed seem surprised to realize his father was light-skinned African-American and his mother was of European extraction. She looked at him, then looked away.

“Thanks for the geology lesson, Elliot,” she said, suddenly using his last name. “I’d better get back to my rounds.”

“Okay, Commander.” He watched her go, grieved that her reaction had been so ambiguous. But, he reminded himself, Laura Stillwell was an exceedingly difficult person to read. You never knew what she was thinking or feeling.

He waited a minute for her to head down to the second floor after following. She was talking to David about their inventories when he came down and walked by. Laura wanted to preserve every atom she could, it seemed. Their life-support equipment had thirty extra kilowatts available to it thanks to extra solar panels they had grabbed from a solar-electric vehicle at the last minute, and as a result the recycling systems could be closed even more efficiently than usual.

As they were talking, and as if the life support system was listening, suddenly there was a loud bursting sound. The three of them all jumped; it was quite startling. “What the…?” exclaimed Laura.

They all looked to the other side of the science room, where a fountain of grayish water had erupted from the seam where the wall jointed the ceiling. The waterfall cascaded down onto computer equipment below.

There was a sudden flash of an electrical short, followed by momentary darkness. Then the lights came back on.

“Red alert!” shouted Laura. A moment later the ship’s computer sounded the alarm bells.

“It looks like the graywater reservoir burst!” said David. “It’s located right there, under the bathroom on the third floor.”

“Let’s salvage the computers while we can,” said Will. He rose and hurried over to the waterfall-smelly, it was sewage-and reach down to unlatch the work station beneath it, even though he got badly splashed. He noticed the water was pretty warm, too. He tugged hard and the station moved across the floor, out of harm’s way.

Laura pushed a button on her communicator. “Attention all crew, we have a bad sewage leak on the second floor of the Ausonia. Sergei, you report to the Cimmerium’s bridge to monitor everything and maintain communication with Earth. Shinji, get out your space suit in case you’re needed. Ethel, we need you here ASAP.”

“Copy,” said Sergei immediately. All six of them wore earpiece communicators and controls on their digital wristwatches, so communication was fast and efficient.

“On my way,” added Ethel.

David hurried to a storage closet and grabbed a stack of cloth towels. He pulled them out and walked to the leak. The three of them spread out the towels to soak up every drop they could. Ethel arrived a few minutes later and grabbed the vacuum cleaner, which could operate in water.

“How much have we lost, here?” asked Laura.

“Maybe fifty kilos,” replied David. “But this isn’t really lost; we can wash the towels and pour the water from the vacuum cleaner into the toilet in the other ship.”

“I’ll clean up the computer,” said Ethel. “Thank God it wasn’t on!”

“The plug shorted, too,” said Laura. “There was a big electrical discharge. We lost power for a second, then it came back on.”

“That means the power surge tripped the circuit breaker in the plug, but not quickly enough; the circuit breaker for the whole floor was tripped. It resets itself in a second, though. I’ll have two days of checking electrical wiring and circuit breakers, and a few days of checking equipment as well.”

“We won’t be able to use the bathroom above us until the tank is welded shut,” added David. “God, what a mess.”

“Why didn’t we detect this problem before it occurred?” asked Laura, angry.

“Ask Sergei,” replied David. “The tank must have been overpressurized to burst, but it has pressure sensors, so there should have been a warning.”

“These recycling systems are designed for gravity, and they were just operating in zero gee for ten days,” noted Will. “Bacterial digestion of human waste occurs at a different rate in zero gee than in gravity.”

“Slower,” replied David. “But in this case I suspect the temperature went up to 60 Centigrade or so, which would cause rapid breakdown of waste. What a mess,” he repeated.

“This room’s going to smell for months,” added Will. “To clean it, we’ll need to use another hundred kilos of water, too.”

“Life support on the Cimmerium’s going to be working overtime,” growled Laura. “We’re not off to a good start any more!”

They kept up the hard and smelly work for an hour, washing the Velcro-sensitive carpet-it wouldn’t be good for use with Velcro any more-and the walls of human waste and shower water, then sucking up the entire mess with the wet vac. They did indeed use about a hundred kilos of precious wash water, though the result was reasonably good. As soon as she could, Laura got away and headed for the control room in the Cimmerium.

“Sergei, how did this happen?” she demanded accusatorily as she entered the bridge.

He was startled. “Look before you accuse! This has nothing to do with our monitoring of systems! Look at the data!” he pushed a few buttons and called up the pressure graph of the sewage tank.

“It’s pretty high!”

“No, it’s at the high end of nominal. It went into the yellow zone just minutes before the rupture, but even that’s not an emergency condition. Maybe the sensor is flaky, or maybe the tank had a really bad weld. Anyway, Houston’s been asking whether we want to abort.”

“Abort, over a shit leak? I don’t think so.”

“That was their view, too. They were watching the clean up and listening. I suspect some of it was broadcast live over cable to a million Mars fans.”

“Our language was a bit salty, too.” But Laura didn’t sound apologetic.

“Houston recommends that the three of us staying in the Ausonia move out for a few days until we fix the problem. The bathroom’s already off limits; I’ve shut off the power. I’ve reprogrammed the air circulation so that the second floor has a slightly lower air pressure than the rest of the Ihab; that’ll keep the smells from spreading.”

“Good. You can relocate to the empty bedroom on the Cimmerium’s fourth floor. Will and David can move to the crew modules of the Olympus and Elysium. We should set up the work area of the Ausonia for agriculture for the rest of the voyage and relocate the work stations for the three of you.”

“Moving the horticultural area of the Cimmerium will take a week, you know, because it’ll have to be dismantled to be moved through the shaft and reassembled afterward, and it only frees up enough space for one work station.”

“I know, but the second floor here can accommodate four already, so with the one extra space that’s five. The other work space can be moved to the first floor of the Ausonia or to the Ausonia’s spare fourth floor bedroom, or even to the shuttles. We have plenty of room. I guess the plan of flying six people in space for eight was a wise one after all.”

“So far. I just hope this isn’t the beginning of a string of bad luck.”

Laura scowled. ‘There’s no such thing as luck, Sergei, good or bad.”

“If you say so, Commander.” Sergei scowled back at her. “Please don’t accuse me of incompetence on a whim.”

“You’re too sensitive. That wasn’t what I meant.” But Laura didn’t apologize.

Filed under: Fiction on August 19th, 2003