“You got it, captain,” Ryan said, and stood up. “I’m out of here.”
5
Ryan
To Ryan Martin, the Don Quijote looked like nothing so much as a mushroom pulled from the ground and sitting on its half-wilted cap. Getting to Mars was a great accomplishment, and cramped and smelly as the Don Quijote had been, Ryan Martin would regret abandoning the Don on Mars. Ugly it was, yeah, stinky and cramped, but it had done the job, a dependable workhorse.
Getting back, though—getting back would be the real triumph. Dulcinea was their ride home, and if there was a problem, the sooner they found out what it was, the sooner they would be able to start fixing it.
The screwy readings from Dulcinea continued to worry Ryan. Even when he was on the surface, while he was thrilled by the beauty of the landscape and enjoyed the freedom of walking on a planetary surface after being cooped up in a soup can for seven months, with a corner of his mind he could not leave Dulcinea alone.
Anomalous readings are always a worry; they indicated something malfunctioning. There were other readings that looked wrong to him as well, readings that weren’t obviously wrong, like the temperature reading, but still they had a wrong feeling. He hoped that the commander was right and it was a sensor failure. God knew that those happened often enough; sensors sometimes seemed like the practical jokers of space, always choosing the middle of the night or some equally inconvenient time to wake up a crew for what would invariably turn out to be a false alarm—but he would be more comfortable if he knew for sure.
The timeline called for them to check out the return ship on the second day on Mars, when the crew was refreshed by a day’s sleep after the long day spent in landing and surface preparations. The commander didn’t want to alter the plan, and he respected that, but if it had been up to him, he would have gone to Dulcinea immediately.
He couldn’t help but glance over at the return ship, temptingly waiting for him just a kilometer away. Dulcinea looked not at all the way Ryan thought a rocket should look, a squat bullet shape aimed skyward. Instead, Dulcinea was a lumpy potato, with just the faintest wisp of white vapor trailing away from the oval tanks at the bottom of the first stage.
At various times, the Dulcinea had been nicknamed by the engineers at the launch complex the pig, the turd, and the flying cow. It was low and fat. With only the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere to penetrate, streamlining had been sacrificed for efficiency, and Dulcinea had all of the aerodynamics of a fire hydrant. One of the launch technicians had accidentally referred to it as the “incredible flying turd” in the presence of a reporter. He had been reassigned to launch sounding rockets from Kodiak Island, and the nickname had been hastily changed to “the amazing flying toad” for damage control. That nickname stuck, although in the presence of management or the press it was always, carefully, the Mars Return Launch Module.
Ryan worried about Dulcinea. If there was something wrong, he wanted to know now.
6
The First Expedition to Mars
Don Quijote had landed on the edge of a region of Mars known as Felis Dorsa—in Latin, “the cat’s back,” or, less literally the cat mountains, since dorsae was the term Mars geologists had given to flat plains broken by long, low ridges. The site had been chosen with great care. The sand between the ridges was smooth and level enough to make a safe landing, but it was an easy traverse by Mars buggy to the Valles Marineris, the feature that the geologists had picked as the highest priority exploration target. The dorsae themselves—low, rounded ridges a hundred miles or more long—made for an additional target for investigation, as geologists continued to argue over the geophysical origin of the ridges. In the Martian tropics south of the equator, the Felis Dorsa featured a relatively mild climate—or at least mild for Mars, where temperatures of a hundred below at night were normal.
And, as a bonus, the two previous expeditions to Mars had both landed in the northern hemisphere, so while the crew of Don Quijote could not claim to be the first humans to the red planet, as a consolation, they could claim a new hemisphere.
The crew, however, had a goal of achieving a different first. They planned to be the first crew to return from Mars alive.
The American expedition to Mars had been planned for decades.
Going to Mars is easy. The difficult part is getting back. If you want to come back, you have to send to Mars an interplanetary ship capable, and with enough fuel, to launch from Mars to Earth. Getting that ship to Mars, fully fueled, is a herculean task.
It is far simpler to land a vehicle unfueled.
The expedition was planned to launch nearly a decade ago, in 2018. The first ship of the expedition, Ulysses, would have no crew. Ulysses would carry with her a robotic fuel manufacturing plant and a payload of liquid hydrogen. While the hydrogen was bulky, over the course of a Martian year it could be used to manufacture twenty times its weight in rocket fuel from the thin Martian atmosphere. When, two years later, the Agamemnon came with the exploration crew, seven astronauts handpicked for their scientific training, Ulysses would be fully fueled for its return, and waiting for them.
It was a plan that had been invented in the 1990s by two Mars enthusiasts, Robert Zubrin and David Baker, and refined over decades to distill out the maximum possible amount of exploration for the smallest investment from Earth.
As a backup, a second return vehicle, with its own fuel-manufacturing plant, was launched to follow behind them on a slower trajectory to Mars. It would be ready if the Ulysses should fail. If the Ulysses worked as planned, the second ship, Dulcinea, would be targeted to a second spot, to wait for a future expedition.
That was the plan. Painstakingly, piece by piece, the building blocks of the expedition were put together by the exigencies of politics and engineering.
Nobody paid attention to the Brazilians.
With the new millennium, chaos had come to the nation once known as the Soviet Union. During the height of the ferocious Russian civil war, rather than let their factories be destroyed and their knowledge lost, a team of rocket engineers had come up with a plan. They had stolen an entire factory, the main Khrunichev engine manufacturing plant, from the digitally controlled milling machines right down to the paper clips in the supervisors’ desks. They got out just days ahead of the tanks of the retreating Russian People’s National Liberation Front, pounding across the steppe toward Moscow under orders to leave no building, no tree, no bridge or lamp post or telephone pole standing.
They had fled to Brazil.
Brazil welcomed the refugees, and, in turn, the refugees had absorbed the Brazilian spirit. Over the decades, Brazil had gradually grown into the economic giant of South America. It was, as ever, a nation of contrasts, where abysmal poverty shared the same street with ostentatious wealth and corporations combined businesslike cool with wild Latin exuberance. Over the first decades of the millennium, Brazil built up its space program. At first, Brazil was no more than a junior partner in the American-led space station. Partly with its own growing engineering force, and partly with the engineering skills of the Brazilo-Russians, they developed an offshore launch platform at Alcântara, just south of the equator, to launch commercial satellites on Brazilian-designed and Brazilian-built launch vehicles.