Venkat rubbed his forehead. “By all means, tell me the nasty stuff.”
“We’ll remove the nose airlock, the windows, and Hull Panel Nineteen.”
Venkat blinked. “You’re taking the front of the ship off?”
“Sure,” Bruce said. “The nose airlock alone is four hundred kilograms. The windows are pretty damn heavy, too. And they’re connected by Hull Panel Nineteen, so may as well take that, too.”
“So he’s going to launch with a big hole in the front of the ship?”
“We’ll have him cover it with Hab canvas.”
“Hab canvas? For a launch to orbit!?”
Bruce shrugged. “The hull’s mostly there to keep the air in. Mars’s atmosphere is so thin you don’t need a lot of streamlining. By the time the ship’s going fast enough for air resistance to matter, it’ll be high enough that there’s practically no air. We’ve run all the simulations. Should be good.”
“You’re sending him to space under a tarp.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Like a hastily loaded pickup truck.”
“Yeah. Can I go on?”
“Sure, can’t wait.”
“We’ll also have him remove the back panel of the pressure vessel. It’s the only other panel he can remove with the tools on hand. Also, we’re getting rid of the auxiliary fuel pump. Sad to see it go, but it weighs too much for its usefulness. And we’re nixing a Stage One engine.”
“An engine?”
“Yeah. The Stage One booster works fine if one engine goes out. It’ll save us a huge amount of weight. Only during the Stage One ascent, but still. Pretty good fuel savings.”
Bruce fell silent.
“That it?” Venkat asked.
“Yeah.”
Venkat sighed. “You’ve removed most of the safety backups. What’s this do to the estimated odds of failure?”
“It’s about four percent.”
“Jesus Christ,” Venkat said. “Normally we’d never even consider something that risky.”
“It’s all we’ve got, Venk,” Bruce said. “We’ve tested it all out and run simulations galore. We should be okay if everything works the way it’s supposed to.”
“Yeah. Great,” Venkat said.
[08:41] MAV: You fucking kidding me?
[09:55] HOUSTON: Admittedly, they are very invasive modifications, but they have to be done. The procedure doc we sent has instructions for carrying out each of these steps with tools you have on hand. Also, you’ll need to start electrolyzing water to get the hydrogen for the fuel plant. We’ll send you procedures for that shortly.
[09:09] MAV: You’re sending me into space in a convertible.
[09:24] HOUSTON: There will be Hab canvas covering the holes. It will provide enough aerodynamics in Mars’s atmosphere.
[09:38] MAV: So it’s a ragtop. Much better.
On the way here, in my copious free time, I designed a “workshop.” I figured I’d need space to work on stuff without having to wear an EVA suit. I devised a brilliant plan whereby the current bedroom would become the new home of the regulator and the oxygenator, and the now-empty trailer would become my workshop.
It’s a stupid idea, and I’m not doing it.
All I need is a pressurized area that I can work in. I somehow convinced myself that the bedroom wasn’t an option because it’s a hassle to get stuff into it. But it won’t be that bad.
It attaches to the rover airlock, so the getting stuff in is going to be annoying. Bring the stuff into the rover, attach the bedroom to the airlock from the inside, inflate it, bring the stuff into the bedroom. I’ll also have to empty the bedroom of all tools and equipment to fold it up any time I need to do an EVA.
So yeah, it’ll be annoying, but all it costs me is time. And I’m actually doing well on that front. I have forty-three more sols before Hermes flies by. And looking at the procedure NASA has in mind for the modifications, I can take advantage of the MAV itself as a workspace.
The lunatics at NASA have me doing all kinds of rape to the MAV, but I don’t have to open the hull till the end. So the first thing I’ll do is clear out a bunch of clutter, like chairs and control panels and the like. Once they’re out, I’ll have a lot of room in there to work.
But I didn’t do anything to the soon-to-be-mutilated MAV today. Today was all about system checks. Now that I’m back in contact with NASA, I have to go back to being all “safety first.” Strangely, NASA doesn’t have total faith in my kludged-together rover or my method of piling everything into the trailer. They had me do a full systems check on every single component.
Everything’s still working fine, though it’s wearing down. The regulator and the oxygenator are at less-than-peak efficiency (to say the least), and the trailer leaks some air every day. Not enough to cause problems, but it’s not a perfect seal. NASA’s pretty uncomfortable with it, but we don’t have any other options.
Then, they had me run a full diagnostic on the MAV. That’s in much better shape. Everything’s sleek and pristine and perfectly functional. I’d almost forgotten what new hardware even looks like.
Pity I’m going to tear it apart.
“YOU KILLED Watney,” Lewis said.
“Yeah,” Martinez said, scowling at his monitor. The words “Collision with Terrain” blinked accusingly.
“I pulled a nasty trick on him,” Johanssen said. “I gave him a malfunctioning altitude readout and made Engine Three cut out too early. It’s a deadly combination.”
“Shouldn’t have been a mission failure,” Martinez said. “I should have noticed the readout was wrong. It was way off.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Lewis said. “That’s why we drill.”
“Aye, Commander,” Martinez said. He furrowed his brow and frowned at the screen.
Lewis waited for him to snap out of it. When he didn’t, she put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said. “They only gave you two days of remote launch training. It was only supposed to happen if we aborted before landing; a cut-our-losses scenario where we’d launch the MAV to act as a satellite. It wasn’t mission-critical so they didn’t drill you too hard on it. Now that Mark’s life depends on it, you’ve got three weeks to get it right, and I have no doubt you can do it.”
“Aye, Commander,” Martinez said, softening his scowl.
“Resetting the sim,” Johanssen said. “Anything specific you want to try?”
“Surprise me,” Martinez said.
Lewis left the control room and made her way to the reactor. As she climbed “up” the ladder to the center of the ship, the centripetal force on her diminished to zero. Vogel looked up from a computer console. “Commander?”
“How are the engines?” she asked, grabbing a wall-mounted handle to stay attached to the slowly turning room.
“All working within tolerance,” Vogel said. “I am now doing a diagnostic on the reactor. I am thinking that Johanssen is busy with the launching training. So perhaps I do this diagnostic for her.”
“Good idea,” Lewis said. “And how’s our course?”
“All is well,” Vogel said. “No adjustments necessary. We are still on track to planned trajectory within four meters.”
“Keep me posted if anything changes.”
“Ja, Commander.”
Floating to the other side of the core, Lewis took the other ladder out, again gaining gravity as she went “down.” She made her way to the Airlock 2 ready room.
Beck held a coil of metal wire in one hand and a pair of work gloves in the other. “Heya, Commander. What’s up?”
“I’d like to know your plan for recovering Mark.”
“Easy enough if the intercept is good,” Beck said. “I just finished attaching all the tethers we have into one long line. It’s two hundred and fourteen meters long. I’ll have the MMU pack on, so moving around will be easy. I can get going up to around ten meters per second safely. Any more, and I risk breaking the tether if I can’t stop in time.”