An attitude jet, fired by the computer, went off with a noise like a machine-gun burst. Kane’s heart stammered for a second, then recovered as his brain identified the sound.
And then he was falling.
The air of Mars whimpered and then screamed as the aeroshell started to burn. Kane’s Valium calm vaporized, and he was sure he was going to die. He’d looked at death before, sometimes gone out of his way to see it, but he’d never had so little control over the outcome. He felt as if he’d been thrown out of a helicopter with a mountain tied to his back. His vision narrowed to a gray, viscous tube, and he prayed he wouldn’t have to take manual control of the ship because he couldn’t lift his arms back up to the keyboard.
One minute, he thought. I only have to take this for sixty seconds. He tried to see the time readout on his crt, but his eyes refused to focus.
The screaming turned into a metal icepick, driving into Kane’s ears. He fought for air, imagining his windpipe collapsing like a soda straw. His lungs burned and he tasted blood.
He kept waiting for it to be over, and the pressure kept getting worse. He felt thumbs gouging his eyes, blood pumping into his feet like water into balloons.And then something stabbed him in the chest.
A rib. I just lost a rib.
He felt the second one break.At first it was just the pressure, focused, inexorable, bearing down over his heart.Then he felt the muscles ripping and the sudden jerk as the bone snapped and bent inward.The pain knifed through his chest and for a long moment his own scream melted inaudibly into the shriek of the burning shield.
The G forces pushed the broken bones deeper into his flesh. He wanted to pass out, but the pain was too intense. He could visualize the points of the ribs, the claws of some giant roc from mythology, digging deep into his heart. Killing him.
And for nothing, he thought. For a rescue mission that’s ten years too late and too screwed up to do any good anyway.A broken-down ship full of losers, raving across 40 million miles to add their dead, burned bodies to the corpses of the Martian colonists.
He was convinced that something had gone wrong.The computers had lost control and the ship was obviously dropping straight out of the sky like a meteor.The deceleration had gone on an impossibly long time, could only end in blazing ruin.
And then the pressure fell away and the gray tunnel closed down into darkness.
When he opened his eyes again, the crt showed that two minutes had elapsed since orbital insertion.They were weightless, and the air was stale and flatulent.Above the time hack an irregular blue egg, dotted
with four or five major craters, filled the screen.
Deimos, Kane thought.They were alive, then. In orbit around Mars.
He sucked a careful breath through the hot bands of pain around his chest. He could hear the ship creak softly as it cooled, the rattle of an off-balance fan in the vent over his head.
“Kane?” Lena’s voice. He managed a grunt in reply.
“Keep still,” she told him.
He knew that.They weren’t even supposed to try to move for two hours.“Broke something,” he managed.“Ribs.”
“Oh, Christ.Any blood? From the lungs, I mean?”
He wasn’t sure. He had blood in his throat, but it could have been from his nose, which was still blowing a fine red mist when he exhaled.
He couldn’t seem to sustain any serious interest in the source of the bleeding. It was nothing compared to the shrapnel fragment that had opened the back of his skull near Dongola and left him nearly helpless between bouts of surgery. Now he was tired of complications, of moods, of dealing with Lena. He felt like a coiled spring that had been carrying a maximum load for nine months, the strain building beyond all tolerance levels, the coils starting to fray and shift out of line.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.“I can manage.”
“I’ll get to you when I can,” Lena said.“Anybody else?”
“I’m all right,”Takahashi said.“Reese is still out.”Of course Takahashi had come through, Kane thought.Three to five hours every day at the treadmill and the bicycle and the rowing machine had kept him precision-tuned, lean and rippling with health. Kane thought him deranged, obsessive, a robot programmed for masochism.Takahashi had been spit out of the factories of the New Japan, gleaming and flawless, blaming his ancestors’ suffering on their excessive spirituality.
“Like Reese,” Takahashi had said once, three months out of Earth, bent over the rowing machine, his muscles flowing like sine waves down his arms. It was the only image Kane had of him from the entire outward flight: there in the wardroom, the air alive with pinpoint dots of his sweat. “All that Ch’an crap of his,” he had said.“Zen. Looking for illumination or cosmic purpose in this. It’s a job. It’s work.That’s all there is to it.”
And now his hands were moving over the keyboard in swift, precise gestures while Kane lay hostile and broken.“Is somebody going to call Houston?” Takahashi asked.
“Go ahead,” Lena told him.“You’re in command.”
“You want to tell him about Kane?”
Him, Kane noticed. It wasn’t Houston they were talking about anymore, it was Morgan. Morgan: Chairman of the Board of Pulsystems, economic king of Houston, the man who had bought all this slightly used hardware from the foundering US government.
“No,” Kane said.“I’ll be okay. Just leave me out of it.” It wasn’t that he was worried about Morgan delaying the mission. It was all the history between the two of them, between him and Morgan. Morgan had raised him since Kane’s father died, ostensibly the benevolent uncle, in fact a ruthless business rival, more concerned with the block of stock that Kane had inherited than with the boy himself.
Kane worked for Morgan, had fought for him in North Africa, but their private struggle had never let up.
Takahashi’s fingers kept rattling on his console as he dictated a mechanical report:“Orbital insertion at 1823 Zulu...”
Kane let his eyes drift back to the bright husk of Deimos on his crt, cold, malformed, impassive. Mars was Ares to the Greeks, the god of war and mindless brutality, running red with blood.They hated him, and they hated his bastard sons, Deimos and Phobos, Fear and Terror. Mars had sired them on Aphrodite and they followed him like vultures over the battlefields to burn and mutilate the dead and dying.
He’d come to know the Greeks better than he’d wanted to, five impossibly long years ago, studying mythology at Rice University.They’d read meaning into everything they saw, humanized an inanimate universe with bloodthirsty zeal.What did they know, Kane wondered, that we don’t?
As Takahashi droned on, Kane drifted in and out of a hazy, painful sleep.When the beeping of an incoming transmission woke him, he saw that he’d lost another half hour.
The cratered oval of Deimos faded into Morgan’s face, the two images nightmarishly superimposed for an instant. Morgan’s hair, dyed unnaturally black, stood straight out from the back of his head where his fingers had repeatedly pushed it. His face was webbed with deep lines and his mouth couldn’t seem to hold a smile. It was early afternoon in Houston, but he had obviously been up the entire night before.
“Our telemetry says you have a successful Mars insertion,” he said. The 18-minute time delay each way gave him the awkwardness of someone speaking into a telephone recorder.“Congratulations, uh, a little late.” Behind him Kane could see five or six white-shirted techs at their consoles in the trench in Mission Control.The picture flickered and Morgan seemed to shift his attention back from something just beyond the camera.“Nothing really to say except we’re all proud of you here, and we’re hoping for good luck ahead, an operable lander, and a safe touchdown.”
The screen flickered again and Kane felt a chill. Subliminals.The son of a bitch was putting subliminals in the broadcast. He jerked his eyes away from the screen and looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed it.What was Morgan up to? What the hell was going on?