“Stand a little further back, kid,” Ryan said. “We don’t know how stable this edge is.”
The canyon was so wide that the opposite wall was misty in the distance. The edges were fluted. Looking down, it was a dizzying drop to an incline of broken rock fragments, the talus slope. Ryan Martin got down on his belly and looked over the edge. It was an absolutely vertical drop, maybe two hundred meters straight, before the rubble at the bottom began to slope outward. The wall looked layered, but it was pretty hard to tell from this angle.
In both directions, the canyon extended out as far as they could see, disappearing in the distance.
“Wow,” Trevor said. “I never thought that Valles Marineris would be so spectacular. It’s like the Grand Canyon.”
Ryan looked at him for a moment, and laughed.
“I don’t get it,” Trevor said. “What’s funny?”
“You think this one is impressive?” Ryan shook his head. “Kid, we’ve still got a long way yet before we get to the big one. This isn’t the Valles Marineris. Just the appetizer.”
“Does it have a name?”
Commander Radkowski had exited the rockhopper and was now standing beside them. “Coprates Catena,” he said. “We’re getting close to the Valles Marineris territory; this is just a groove in the crust that didn’t make it to the big time. It runs about five hundred kilometers, and then it ends.”
“You want to detour around?” Ryan said.
Radkowski shook his head. “No, that would probably take at least two days, and we don’t have extra time to spare. And, besides, we might as well get started rappelling. We’re going to be forced to, later, anyway.”
Trevor looked into the canyon, and shuddered. “You’re joking.” He looked at them. “Tell me you’re joking.”
But neither of the other two were laughing.
Ryan went back to the rockhopper to fetch the block and tackle.
The cable was made of a superfiber material called Spectra 10K. It consisted of a thread of buckminsterfullerine nanotubes woven in a matrix of polyethylene. It was nearly as thin as spiderweb, and despite a coating of fluoropolymer, almost as invisible.
Fifty kilometers of the superfiber was wound up on a silicon-carbide deployment spool barely larger than Ryan’s fist. Despite its thinness the cable was plenty strong enough to hold the weight of the entire team, and the rockhopper itself.
Radkowski tested several rock outcroppings at the rim of the canyon, and chose one that was part of the bedrock, or at least something so large that the rockhopper could not move it. The bedrock was a dark, dense basalt, its surface smooth and uncracked. Radkowski drilled an anchor point into the rock, and Ryan fixed a titanium bolt into the hole with an epoxy plug. A second bolt was fixed for redundancy, and then a separate safety line was set with a third and fourth anchor. Radkowski affixed the cables, with Ryan watching over to check his work. When they were done, he called Tana over and made her repeat the checkout as he watched her.
They were ready to go.
Getting Estrela out of the rockhopper was a difficult task. Her sprained ankle, taped firmly, could be forced into the Mars suit’s boot, but her arm was still too swollen to slide into the form-fitting sleeve of the Mars suit, even with the piezoelectric fabric fully relaxed. Tana finally solved this problem by taping Estrela’s left arm firmly to her chest, as if she were cradling her breasts with her arm. They could then shut the chest carapace with her arm inside the shell. Estrela told her that as long as she did not try to inhale too deeply, it felt okay. A balloon patch sealed the opening where the sleeve should have been.
“That should hold,” Ryan said.
“You’d better help me, I think,” Estrela said.
By leaning on Tana at one side, and with Ryan supporting her on the other, they got her out of the rockhopper and moved her over to a shelf of rock where she could watch.
Radkowski entered the rockhopper, slaved the controls to a remote unit, and then sealed it up.
“You all know enough not to try to touch the cable with your hands,” Radkowski said. That had been covered in their training, but apparently he wanted to make sure. “If you have to handle it, use the deployment spool, or else use a handling tool. But it would be better just to stay clear.” He looked at each of them, and waited until they nodded. “Good.”
A take-up reel specifically designed for fullerine superfiber was fixed onto the anchor cable. One control on the reel loosened or tightened a friction brake on the deployment reel. A second control allowed them to spool the fiber up onto the take-up reel at a gear ratio of a thousand. A separate attach-point held their safety line.
Using the remote, Commander Radkowski inched the rover to the edge of the cliff. The nose of the vehicle dipped, and for a moment he hesitated.
Then, trailing behind him a fiber as thin and as invisible as a spider’s thread, he drove the rockhopper off the cliff.
4
Thread
John Radkowski had had experience with superfiber cable nearly ten years before. On the space station, it had been used to dispose of garbage.
In the twenty-first century, Radkowski discovered, the job of astronaut was a half step down from truck driver.
Expensive, high-tech satellites were delivered by unmanned space boosters: cheap, reusable, and too small to ferry humans, they made fortunes for the farsighted investors who had invested in the low-cost transportation and built the whirling network of satellites that surrounded the Earth like a plague of gnats.
To launch people into space, though, they still used the ancient space shuttle. Refurbishing and upgrading had made the shuttles more efficient, adding all-electronic controls and liquid-propellant fly-back boosters, but they were still recognizably the fragile white elephants that had flown in the previous century. Decades of pampering care had made each shuttle orbiter idiosyncratic, with its own set of operating procedures and engineering work-arounds for misbehaving parts. With never quite enough money to adequately refurbish them, and far too little to engineer a new launch system, the space shuttles were still the best way to reliably launch humans into space.
The job of astronaut meant that Radkowski ferried scientists up and down to the space station and was responsible for shepherding the scientists while they were in space, making sure that they followed safety regulations and didn’t do anything that would jeopardize the station or their own lives. This, he discovered, was a tough job. The scientists—pierced and pony-tailed young men with goatees and glasses, earnest-faced young women with irreverent T-shirts and disconcertingly direct gazes that he had trouble meeting—had almost an uncanny instinct for skipping safety rules and getting in trouble.
It was a job.
The first time he had visited the space station he had been impressed with the sheer size of it. The modules had seemed small when he trained in the weightless tanks, but once out there, in orbit, all the modules together with trusses and external experiment modules and solar arrays and appendages, it seemed to be huge.
Inside, the first thing to hit him was how noisy it was. He had expected silence, or perhaps the muted hum of an air circulation fan. Instead it had been full of sounds: clatters and clicking and hums, buzzes of machinery and whirring of fans, computers and lab equipment monitors beeping, voices carrying from modules far away. Then he was impressed with how cluttered it was. Later he amended that: not cluttered, exactly, just crammed. Every wall was filled with things, and in a space station, that meant the “floor” and the “ceiling” walls as well. It was almost impossible to find anything, unless you remembered to make a clear note of where it had been put.