In the Shadow of Ares, page 1
IN THE SHADOW OF ARES
Thomas L. James
and
Carl C. Carlsson
Published by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson
Copyright 2010 Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson
Thomas’ Acknowledgements
When we started this book project, we had no idea it would take as long as it did. Many thanks to those who offered advice and support along the way, and who read and commented on the early drafts: Laurel and Paul Barsa, Mike Williams, Sandie Campbell, Liz Gauthier, Wesley Martin, Debbie Brown, Sarah Brown, Melanie Miller, Eileen Mahony, and Wesley and Mindy Dickinson.
Carl’s Acknowledgements
This book has been a multi-year process, and there have certainly been others who helped along the way. Thanks to the many people who provided technical information and feedback on early drafts: Joe Palaia, John Connolly, Carla Conrad, Cliff Price, David Thibodeau, Nuralon Dohnanyi, Sharron McClellan, Patt Czarnik, Tam Czarnik, Cayce Carlsson, Birgitte Carlsson, Elizabeth Burke, Daniel Gasteiger, Lauren Feehery, Mary Margaret Feehery, Catherine Williams, Curtis Alden, Caleb Tomme, Adam Foster, LouAnne Archer, Ronald Joseph, Anita Gale, Linda Guynn, George Walczak, and Dave Gill. Most of all I’d like to thank my daughters Dagny, Elena and Hanna Carlsson for their inspiration – keep dreaming, girls! To those I forgot to mention, a thousand apologies.
Prologue
Aboard the Odysseus Habitation (“Hab”) Module
Ares III Joint US/Russian Mission to Mars
September 4, 2029
Dan Martinez knew what was wrong without turning around. “Ashley! Get...” he barked, then caught himself when he turned and saw his wife’s brow knit in irritation. Must remember to watch my tone, he thought, and sighed. “Please get Sergei a Meclizine.”
“Sorry, Daniel,” a weak voice muttered from the seat behind him. Sergei Tarasov was a squat man, square-jawed and cocky — but at the moment he was ashen, and uncharacteristically humble.
Martinez returned to the commander’s checklist on his tablet with an irritated shake of his head. The only crewmember who suffered from motion sickness was naturally their flight medic. The man trains for this mission for five years, and still gets queasy when we drop the tether and go back to zero gee.
While his wife fished through a medical kit, he stole a glance out the nearby window, then remembered Mars was not visible from their current orientation. I don’t care how carefully the NASA shrinks studied and analyzed us and prepared us for this mission, he thought, five months cooped up in a flying tuna can with three other people and just about anything gets on your nerves. Sure will be nice to get out and stretch my legs on the surface.
Milla Tarasov, Sergei’s wife and the mission’s co-pilot, floated in from her own check of the hab’s lower deck. “Checklist complete,” she stated simply as she tapped a command on her tablet to file the results, “all nonessential equipment is stowed and ready for landing.” She twisted and turned through the tight cabin with the grace that suited her ballerina form. Her facial features were slightly softened without the normal pull of gravity, but her elegant cheekbones and arresting grey eyes still showed why NASA’s public affairs office funneled most interview requests her way.
Martinez frowned again at his checklist: there was still so much to do. Sergei’s sudden nausea was trivial and not unexpected, but any distraction at this point was not a good thing. It was one more thing to deal with in their already-tight landing preparation timeline, and it could cause them to miss something important.
Twenty minutes later, with the remaining preparations completed and Milla strapped back into her seat, Martinez watched the clock, willing himself to relax. It helped him to focus on a picture of his and Ashley’s children taped above the commander’s console, taken at Daniel Jr.’s business school graduation the year before. Danny’s cocky smile and square-jawed features fit the old “right stuff” stereotype more than either of his astronaut parents, and friends and family were surprised when he didn’t follow their path. Maybe he can have both, the way space commerce is taking off. His younger sister Kathryn stood by his side. Sorry we couldn’t be there for your graduation, too. Kathryn’s auburn hair gleamed in the summer sunlight, challenging the radiance of her smile, and the intent focus of her dark eyes gave only a hint of the sharp mind behind them. She looks more and more like her mother.
Martinez glanced at his wife, smiled, and winked. Ashley, double-checking her seat restraints, returned his smile, his earlier harshness readily forgiven. What would things be like when they returned? By then their children would be grown into their careers, perhaps with small children of their own. Grandchildren. He sighed…they would miss so much while they were gone.
The remaining minutes before atmospheric entry ticked away on the command display before him. The broad arc of the heat shield beneath the hab still blocked most of the view, but through the small window above the pilot’s console he saw a sliver of ruddy beige bordered in a pale blue-violet haze: Mars. Already bigger than he had expected, it grew slowly larger as he watched – much more noticeably than an Earth reentry, exactly as the previous Ares crews had described. His heart fluttered, and his lips stretched into a small, proud smile. This is it.
The edge of the Martian sky was so thin that it vanished into the nothingness of space. There was no distinct moment defining when they had crossed the boundary between sky and space, only a ghostly sensation of weight settling them into their couches, so faint that it went unnoticed at first. Not long after, a pale yellow glow outlined the heat shield, obscuring the Martian horizon. “Atmospheric contact,” he observed. So far, so good.
If everything continued normally, the automatic systems would take it from here to the last sixty seconds before touchdown: steering the hab through atmospheric entry, jettisoning the heatshield at the right moment, and deploying the giant parafoil. The autopilot could even perform the retrorocket descent if necessary, but it was tradition — a sop to the pilots, really — to keep a human in the loop for this critical phase.
The deceleration rate increased rapidly, pushing the crew deeper into their couches and making them feel heavier than they had since the trans-Mars injection burn six months earlier. “There’s no cure for space sickness like two gees,” Sergei muttered glumly over the deep rumble of the hab as it penetrated deeper into the atmosphere.
But then, the acceleration took on a strange feel: “down” was no longer quite “down”, but seemed to shift to one side a little and then back again, as though they were swaying on the end of a long rope. No, not quite swaying, Martinez thought, more like turning slightly from side to side, like a fish swimming through water. He and Milla looked at each other. She mirrored his worried frown — Trouble? — but before either could speak the odd sensation passed, lost in the normal rattling of reentry.
“Twenty seconds to max heating,” he announced, following the descent and landing checklist. Everything about an Ares mission was scripted, preplanned — the mission planners at NASA were a superstitious lot, and had designed a ritual for every contingency. Almost every contingency. Martinez wasn’t naïve – he knew there were a few situations for which the agency hadn’t bothered to make plans.
The hab shimmied suddenly, and the strange twisting oscillation returned, growing stronger by the second. Now Martinez himself felt a touch of nausea. “Status!” he demanded.
Milla stepped through the systems checklist. “Heatshield: green. Propulsion: green. Comm: green. Nav: green. Power, Chutes, Life Support: all green. All systems nominal!”
Martinez looked at the crazy accelerometer readings, and felt the swaying and shimmying of the hab — clearly something wasn’t nominal. Outside, the angry orange glow around the rim of the heat shield seemed to pulse in time with the sway of the hab, and inside, the display from the accelerometers throbbed at the same beat, side to side, around and around.
“Check exterior visuals.” His throat tingled and he felt a squeezing sensation in his stomach. If this keeps up much longer...
“Roger, ext—”
The hab lurched violently to the right, swinging Milla’s hand wide of the console. But this time, the hab kept moving in that direction, shoving the crew against their seat straps with the same force that had been pushing them down into their couches a moment earlier. The reaction control system display indicated the starboard steering thrusters were firing uselessly at full power, but could not stop the sideways motion. If allowed to continue, they’d burn up all the fuel he needed to steer to a proper landing.
Damned autopilots! “Switching to manual control!” Martinez flipped up a safety cover on his armrest and tripped the switch to disengage the autopilot. Gripping the hand controllers, he fired the thrusters to rotate the hab about its central axis, desperately trying to keep the vehicle oriented in the proper direction for entry. The sideways acceleration ebbed somewhat, but there was no mistaking that they were now coming down far off their initial descent track. What is going on? Never mind that now — focus on the immediate problem!
He kept at it, firing quick bursts from the thrusters every few seconds to keep the hab oriented and stable. After a few minutes, the plasma plumes and acceleration tapered off, the furnace flames and crushing weight being replaced by the now blue-lavender haze of the thin Martian atmosphere and a weight closer to what they had become acclimated to on the transit from Earth.
A quick check of systems showed that everything was still
“Mission Control this is Odysseus,” Martinez said, returning as best he could to the standard script. “We’ve had some sort of anomaly. Nav systems down, under manual control, initiating heat shield jettison sequence...now!” He flipped another switch on his armrest. A deep thud sounded overhead as the small drogue chutes deployed to stabilize the hab, shoving them down into their seats again. A long moment later came another and harder shove as the drogues separated and dragged open the main parafoil. A few anxious heartbeats after that, the firing of explosive bolts rang through the floor from several directions at once, releasing the heat shield. Through unobstructed windows, they now saw a mottled yellow-brown landscape beneath an increasingly bright lavender-pink sky.
Martinez caught a brief glimpse of the heat shield as it slowly tumbled away. For an instant, he thought he saw something on it, some sort of discoloration on the windward surface. Something very large — and very wrong. Put it aside, he thought. It’s all being recorded, you can check it out later. Focus on now. With muffled clangs, the six slender landing legs deployed and locked into place. The important thing is to get us down safely.
The terrain below looked odd, unfamiliar. The mission plan called for them to land in Tithoniae Fossae, as near as possible to the Earth Return Vehicle they would use to come home sixteen months from now. They all knew the terrain of Tithoniae Fossae better than they knew anywhere else on Mars.
One small problem: the jumble of cliffs and valleys passing by below was clearly not Tithoniae Fossae.
“Nav system is still out,” Milla announced, “inertial positioning is down, getting no signals from satellites. Diagnostics and resets negative. All that rattling must have done some permanent damage.”
“Communications?”
“Primary comm is also offline. We’re transmitting cabin audio only, on backup UHF. No telemetry.”
“What about the beacon?” Martinez asked. Can we pick up the ERV’s transponder signal?”
“I’m getting a signal, but it’s very faint. Fades in and out.”
Damn. A good signal from the ERV landing beacon would have made this a lot easier. “We’re in range, at least. Good thing the altimeter still works. Keep trying to get a lock on the signal. Ashley, Sergei, watch the exterior cameras for landmarks: valleys, craters, volcanoes, anything big that might tell us where we are.” Occupied with landing the hab, Martinez’ attention was focused now on the altimeter, propulsion status display, and the downward-facing viewports in front of the commander’s station.
“Thirty seconds to parafoil jettison,” he said. And then sixty seconds until we land, one way or another. “Milla, forget the Penelope; help me find a place to put us down.”
Milla pointed. “There — ahead one kilometer, port side. The mesa." A long expanse of flat, unbroken rock lay far ahead of them. The high land looked smooth enough for a safe landing, but who could be sure from this far? They'd have to risk it — it was the only promising spot in the jumble of canyons and gullies below. "Can we make it?” The slight hoarseness in her question was Milla's only outward indication of concern.
“We’ll have to.” Martinez nudged the hand controller, which currently relayed commands to the steerable parafoil. The hab’s course shifted slowly towards the mesa. Will it be enough? Barely. He’d have to make up the difference with the landing rockets, or make do with a marginal spot short of that...if there was one.
The system clock ticked down the seconds, one by one, as they drifted towards their improvised landing site. Jagged crevices swept by below, closer and closer now, interspersed with the occasional tilted slab of red or grey-brown rock. Ahead, the mesa grew larger. It’s going to be close.
"Altitude six hundred meters, down twenty-three meters per second, ahead thirty," Milla announced.
“Parafoil jettison in three, two, one...jettison! Firing retros!” They felt a little heavier in their seats now. The deep bass of the descent engines rumbled softly in the thin atmosphere outside, felt through the deck more than heard.
“Three hundred meters, down thirteen, ahead twenty-four,” Milla called out.
We shouldn't be losing this much forward velocity, Martinez thought, steering the engines to compensate. They were closing in on the mesa, but they were still a good half-kilometer from where he wanted to put down.
“Two hundred meters, down eight, ahead twenty,” she said.
The descent engines were gimbaled all the way back, and he dared not throttle them any higher until the final few seconds. Why are we still slowing down?
Meter by meter the mesa grew closer, until at last the final broken ridge came into view. He sighed with relief. It might be a rough landing, but they were going to make it now for sure.
As if on cue, the altimeter chimed the 100 meter warning, signaling the start of the final descent. But Martinez held back on the throttle.
“One hundred meters, down seven, ahead eighteen," Milla said.
“Fifty meters, down six, ahead fifteen.”
“There’s a big canyon over there, to starboard,” Ashley pointed out.
“Lots of canyons down there,” Sergei muttered. “We could be anywhere.”
“Forty meters, down five, ahead twelve."
"Beginning final descent,” Martinez announced. He eased the hand controller forward, and the roar of the engines rumbled ever louder through the cabin walls. He was momentarily aware of the bead of sweat running down his right temple. We'll have to land a little short.
“Twenty meters, down two, ahead eight,” Milla said.
Still losing forward velocity. Come on, come on. At last, the ridge slid by below.
“Twenty-three meters, down one, ahead eight."
"Engine cutoff in ten seconds.” They would drop the last ten meters in order to avoid kicking up a miniature dust storm with the engines, as had happened to Ares II. The hab was built to withstand a thirty meter drop in the low Martian gravity, if necessary, but a drop from ten was still more of a jolt than he liked.
The mesa wasn’t quite as flat as it appeared from a distance, but ahead lay a smooth, level field, a little below the escarpment now rolling past in the downward window. Perfect. Just a little further.
“Dunes,” Ashley called out. “Down in that valley to starboard. Lots of them!”
“Ten meters, down one, ahead one — engine cu—”
Suddenly, the altimeter chimed a warning and Milla called out in alarm, “Altitude 1600 meters!” There was an impossibly deep — Martian deep — canyon, hidden in the shadow of the escarpment.
And they were dropping right into it, already dipping below the cliff on the other side.
With a quick jerk of the controller, he throttled the engines up into their emergency reserve ranges. Their descent slowed, then stopped, and they began to rise again. Martinez watched as the edge of the cliff slipped by the viewport at his feet, close enough to see the colored bands and deep cracks in the vertical surface. The hab shuddered momentarily as they passed over the edge, but continued forward. An indicator at the top of the console lit up blue for an instant, but winked off again before Milla could react.
An angry cloud of dust boiled up around them, and after a long moment the indicator lit up again. “Contact!” Milla called out. Martinez cut the engines, just as alarms signaled the impending depletion of the emergency propellant reserves. The hab dropped the remaining two meters, landing on the mesa with an incongruously gentle thump.
They had made it.
The crew looked at each other for a long, quiet moment, before Martinez grinned broadly and broke the heavy silence. “Houston, this is Ares III. We’ve had a bit of excitement here, but we’ve landed safe and sound. Initiating post-landing checkout and vehicle safing.” There would be time for celebration later, along with figuring out where they were and what had gone wrong. For now, the crew members fell into their familiar, well-rehearsed roles, checking the post-landing status of vehicle systems and transitioning the hab from landing mode to surface mode.
